Part of the “scale from single player to leader of the galactic forces” is that even if it were done, you’d end up having fast travel and skip systems anyway.
Have not kept up with Star Citizen but I understand they are still around. It's interesting that the author criticized game engines like CryEngine 2 and UE4 vs building your own engine. Lately, I've been following the indie game dev scene quite a bit and I'm very impressed with what even one or two devs are able to build with modern Unity. I wonder how much more mature UE and Unity are these days and whether the comment on building your own engine still applies or not.
I was not very aware of this game, but apparently according to Wikipedia they have taken over 400 million in funding!? I guess this is more like Star Citizen Eternal.
I don't want anything to do with the drama... but I backed a while ago and only just played the first time last fall for about 2 months and I've already got my monies worth. If you can make it past the rough edges there are already magical moments not available anywhere else available in the game and I can't wait to see what they do in the future.
Recently Jackfrags who I watch cover FPS games on youtube played it and my reaction was similar.
Wikipedia tells me pre-production began in 2010, with a Kickstarter in 2012. It is 2022 and the game's site claims it is actually available: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-now "While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage of development, it is playable now. New content, features, and fixes are consistently added as development continues, with a major patch released each quarter."
How it compares to No Man's Sky (initial release: 2016, last update: late 2021, on its fifth anniversary) is anyone's guess, it's Windows-only and I'm a Mac girl, and even if I had something to play it on I'm not too interested in spending $45 on what is likely to be disaster tourism. (Edit: apparently it is pretty good for people who enjoy pretending to be a long-haul space pilot, so my “disaster tourism” projection was completely wrong. Yay!)
Also this made me curious what Mr. Smart's up to right now and, sigh, the latest article on his blog is him declaring the inevitability of blockchain gaming; he's even repeating the line about how NFTs will let you move stuff between different games.
I've played NMS pretty much since release, off and on. First on Playstation, but I then bought it on Steam for Linux and plan to get it on the Switch when it drops.
It's a fantastic game if you have friends to play with, or are interested in joining online groups. There's thousands of planets out there and I still get excited when I'm in a random galaxy and find something awesome I can share with the community.
The single player in NMS is less fun than Multiplayer, but if you are down for what is basically space minecraft I still would say it's worth it!
And for anyone wondering, it works great on Proton and the devs are maintaining support for Proton as well (thanks, Steam Deck!)
Serious question - mind sharing what you enjoy about NMS multiplayer? I tried it recently but the mission goals weren’t shared. So basically, we were playing two “solo” campaigns next to each other and got bored. Is there more to it?
I think I was one of few people not disappointed by NMS, I have it on Playstation. I just saw it come up on the store, it looked like something I'd like and bought it and I was pretty happy with it. I had no idea about all the press around it. I still play it on and off. I hardly ever play anything multiplayer, I was just enjoying flying around all the planets.
I've played SC on and off. I've gotten my money's worth for sure.
The dogfighting module is pretty polished, it's fun to run on the flight simulator and VR headset. It's my go to space sim as there's nothing that compares even though it's not done.
The persistence module is fun to dick around with, the seamless landing on a planet and exploring is cool as shit.
I don't have a rig to power the FPS module very well so I can't give a fair review, but the mechanics and controls seem fine.
Love the immersion and I follow it asynchronously. They're still going at it and I applaud the effort. Would rather have a great game eventually than a shit dead game a year ago.
My favorite part of the flight sim is how ships take damage. You can lose various RCS thrusters and still fly, but obviously it's more difficult. Landing can be a fun ordeal without thrusters in every direction.
SC has been a fantastic spend for $40 for my original kickstarter pledge. I even bought another ship for a 2nd account because the game is really most enojied with others.
I have 100+ hours, and yes it fracking sucks when you spend half an hour going to some desolate moon, to do the equivalent of some USPS worker, just to stub your toe on the stairs and die. Be spawned back Lorville, wait for the wrecking crew get your ship, only to realize you og ship has dsynced and every was a waste. But it is funny, or at least maybe I enoji that masochism of it all. Besides that the game is actually really beautiful and weird, and vast, and lonely, all in one.
When did the internet or HN in general become the gatekeepers on what people are allowed to enoji or spend their money on. We all do stuff than anyone else can call out as wasteful.
I wish the game was in a better state but I can't say the $5/mo or so I spend on it has been wasted. I play with a friend and I upgrade my ship every couple months (hence the $5).
If they got rid of the forced slow play where you have to trek from apartment (or hospital) to the ship request terminal I'd be a lot happier. Or at least they could let you request a new ship using your mobiglas wherever you are.
I dont do the subscription, but i do install once or twice a year. Usually after a rebuild or reinstall to use as a benchmark. It's my current "Can it run Doom?" s/Doom/Star Citizen/
I see a lot of people only showing the albeit awesome footage of space battles. The game also comes with a FPS, and even some missions in the main game where you need to inspect some derelict ship or space station are missing.
NMS has done a good job addressing their shortcomings in the last years, but it still is no where compared to the detail and fidelity of SC.
And then I wanna mention the other weird fun tech they have. They have face point tracking for your avatar. That have done crazy stuff with spatial audio. Im not trying to stan them, but theres way more under the surface of than the game.
I ain’t gonna yuck your yum, I’m writing this comment while waiting for Elden Ring to reload after yet another stupid death. :)
I am glad people who enjoy pretending to be a space pilot are enjoying this one, all I know about it is it’s long-standing status as one of the biggest Kickstarter vaporware stories, which I guess is a list it can finally come out of after about a decade of development!
I dunno, it sounded good while I was taking a brief break from pretending to be a barefoot waif in a nightgown who’s wandering around a post-apocalyptic fantasy land waving a wand and making rocks smash monsters. shrug
Clearly it's time for me to move Star Citizen from my mental bin of "lengthy crowdfunding horror stories" to the one for "games that actually exist"! Spaceship sims ain't my thing so I don't keep track of them. :)
Reminds me a lot of what you could do in "Tachyon: The Fringe". Space combat sims are a lot more fun when their devs remember that spacecraft aren't as constrained as World War II fighters.
For me, the constraints are what makes WWII fighters so fun. I've tried some space sims, but without aerodynamic limits I always feel like I'm piloting a spinning ball of lasers.
There's nothing else like it in deathmatch, though. I've never seen an AI that can really handle a ship with that kind of maneuverability, but I've played against other humans who could, and it plays out like something out of Babylon 5's wettest dreams - just an absolutely wild and barely predictable furball, especially because any time you're not closely pressing your opponent you risk them severely contracting your maneuver options with a missile launch.
Too, as the linked video helps demonstrate, it makes attacking capships a lot more feasible and a lot more fun - most games' capships are extremely hard targets for fighters because of their defensive armament and because a fighter operating as if aerodynamically constrained has a hard time making a strafing pass count. Freespace 2 gives bombers shipkiller missiles to help with this, but it's still a real problem with ships that mount a lot of point defense - as it is, those are so good at swatting fighters that you don't really have any way to answer them. Lifting the aerodynamic maneuvering limitation rebalances the engagement in a way that gives attacking fighters a lot more tactical flexibility, and gives a good deal of added salience and complexity to the escort role besides.
Star Citizen can change gaming for the better. It can break the corporate-induced cycle of rehashing old game formats with slightly better graphics to siphon off money instead of providing more gameplay.
Consider this: We need something new - there is absolutely no need for another rehashed clone of Privateer/Freelancer/Whatever. We played hundreds of such games. Nobody has been able to bring a new paradigm into this game genre since 1980s. Its the same old thing.
With the hardware power that our computers attained since 1980s, we should be playing games that are much bigger in scope and much more immersive right now. We are not. We are playing the same rehashed games with better graphics. The gameplay is almost the same and cheap. Every major company that consolidated the gaming space is just rehashing this genre like all the other genres for profit, without bringing in anything new.
Star Citizen is trying to change that. Its trying to create an entire universe in which you can make your space coffee, eat your space breakfast and move into whatever adventure you want in a living, breathing universe. Its trying to put is in something that is worth our time and attention today, instead of a rehashed copy/paste of whatever successful simplicity that was invented in the earlier decades.
Its going to be difficult. Even making one living, breathing space-city for people to experience is like making a singular, major MMO game. Making a planet - even bigger. An universe? Phenomenal work.
It was obvious that there would be needed gigantic funding on an ongoing basis and A LOT of work. It was obvious that a lot of developers would burn out on the way. It was certain that it would take a lot of time.
STILL, its worth it. We need SOMETHING NEW now. Since 1970s, we got CPU power increase a TRILLION FOLD, but the games we play today STILL have the gameplay of 1970s' successful games despite all the new potential that immense CPU (and accompanying GPU) power provides. We need something that will make us immerse thoroughly in games, universes in ways we never did before. Star Citizen is trying that. And its a major step in the right direction.
Very true. This is what makes games like Red Dead Redemption II so amazing.
In the end making a game is like any other complex engineering project. The hard part isn't conceiving of something awesome worth doing, concepting a world, the dreaming part. The hard part is wrapping your collective head around the magnitude of work required, managing and putting limits on that, and successfully dividing up and doling out the work so that it's done in close to the promised time frame.
There is a famous saying I'm forgetting, something about anyone can work on something forever, successful teams ship product.
There's an argument to be made that Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design) has been iterating on the same game since ~1995, and releasing as they hit milestones and polish they were comfortable with.
Which seems like an incredibly reasonable way to approach doing something complicated...
Kind of. it's really more that they have refined a game engine over that time, and used that to make better and better individual games. In that sense it's more of a platform thing. They have been working on a platform that has allowed them to leverage and share work across individual games.
Youre right in all of those. Except, we don't want the product of another successful project management and software development. We want to move forward.
Current games also take 10^10 as long to create compared to the games of 1970s. The effort was put into making these games. They materialized. The next generation of games wont materialize without someone putting in the effort and the money.
Tons of innovative games come out every year. Star Citizen is cool and all but it's hardly innovative. It IS a thirteen year old boy's dream game, though, I'll give it that
The last thing games need right now is a bigger scope.
AAA projects are playing it safe, precisely because they're so big that failing would be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, smaller games are redefining the medium. Disco Elysium has impressive writing and an interesting perspective on politics. FromSoftware games look technically worse but are teeming with creativity. Echo VR showed me the value of social presence in multiplayer games. And Outer Wilds... oh, Outer Wilds.
Also your assumption that "bigger == better", reminds me of how some people used to think that realism and realistic graphics where the ultimate goal.
I paid USD$55 back in 2017-02, and played a little at the time, but just didn't get it.
I came back to it in ~2019, but again it felt like a high barrier, requiring the kind of esoteric knowledge you'd get if you'd been consistently tracking all the updates to really enjoy. (And there was a LOT of email updates about the project.)
Also what felt like heavy selling on new spacecraft and addons, while I remained confused about what you're actually meant to do in the game, frustrated by the sandbox mechanics & limitations, bewildered by how resilient my ship was and what happened if it was destroyed (pricing was mostly around buying ships, I believe).
I now suspect persistent MMOG universes just aren't my thing.
Star Citizen really is something special. I backed it during 2021/the pandemic, despite the controversy and not knowing much about it, because I wanted to try something a bit different and growing up my dad fed me a steady diet of Asimov, Clarke, and Gibson. Besides, I'm privileged enough to be in a position that being out $100 for a virtual space ship is an acceptable risk to me.
While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.
The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today!
I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!
There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :)
In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.
The main things that come to mind are somewhat related. The big one, especially in comparison to a game like NMS, which is similar at a high level, is that much of the game is fully 'physicalized'. I'm not sure if that's the right terminology or just a term popularized by CIG, but the goal is that, while meeting the rule of fun, all entities are represented physically in game. This includes things like ship components/modules. Your radar, cooler, or shield components should all be physically moveable. Ship parts are one of the more complicated outcomes for this goal, but cargo and items, their precise physical location is stored by this hierarchical graph database in real time and persistent. Another example is you can put one ship inside of another and act as a large scale transport.
The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet!
Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship.
The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before.
Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.
That's a fair point and one of the most consistent criticisms of CIG. Right now servers are limited to 50 players at a time. If you look at reddit or the CIG forums you'll see a lot of people talking about the goal of 'server meshing'. This is really just offloading as much work as possible into their own services, so the server side application doesn't fall over under load. Server meshing is the outcome of this work, which lets them scale up to larger populations more easily.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.
Cloth deformation physics are fairly standard these days, and are already in the game. Criticising “bedsheet physics” is something media latched onto as a way to generate outrage clicks. Congratulations, you fell for it, and repeated it.
(If you look at the actual progress report that was talking about bedsheets, you’ll note it was from the AI team—in other words, how to make the AI enter/exit beds while interacting properly with the physics engine. Pretty normal stuff.)
I'd never seen this, thanks! Breaking out the popcorn. I worked on SC in 2010/11, pre-crowdfunding, and it's funny and head-smacking to see this all laid out as a documentary, even spotting some of my own work here and there in the earliest cuts. It's so bizarre to me that this development is still going on, and still in "alpha" although obviously it's now become an insanely huge product. Chris Roberts did not know he'd hit his crowdfunding goal.. and I think that's why he didn't go with Kickstarter initially, because he was going to work on the game one way or another. He sank his own money into building working demos before crowdfunding. IMHO it would have all been up and running by 2014 if there hadn't been so much money and hype. The fan expectations exceeded what was realistic from the moment it was announced, and just kept going higher. It's one of those things I look at in my life and have a hard time drawing a conclusion from. The obvious conclusions about shipping vs bike-shedding don't quite apply, because at some point the making of the game and the game itself became too intertwined. I'm glad to see it's made some people here happy now and it's finally starting to live up to its promise.
Not to be too big of an asshole, but you really don't see the lesson here? To me, it's crystal clear. You don't allow a dreamer to be a project manager. They get bogged down in the dream and never finish the damn project. At some point, the dreamer has to hand off the dream to the doer, and let the doer go get it done.
I don't disagree with that. I think in practice, the reason the campaign was so successful initially was that players wanted the dreamer to be in charge of every aspect of the project and to dream big... so once you get locked into that cycle, it's really hard to get out of it, even if you are someone who's good at delegating, which isn't CR's strong suit. Knowing when and how to hand off "your baby" is harder when you're getting all that positive affirmation that people are really excited for you to do it, and your name and reputation are totally riding on living up to gamers' expectations. It's a sort of self-reinforcing trap, and I'm not making excuses for the excesses of hubris, but nothing would have happened if not for that hubris to begin with. I guess if there's one conclusion I could draw it would be that dreamers need to be balanced by a practical co-founder with equal power in cases like this. But that was never a real possibility here.
Star Citizen is the pretty much one of the only visionary MMOs since the mid 2000s (except for maybe Darkfall).
I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back.
For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it.
I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it.
The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason.
The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision.
Here's what I think needs to happen:
1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made
2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players.
3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max.
AND/OR
3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues.
A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread(famous quote from the author about how long CIG had left before bankruptcy)
And if your expertise is building engines perhaps you should build an engine instead of a game?
Recently Jackfrags who I watch cover FPS games on youtube played it and my reaction was similar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5niLl0fank
How it compares to No Man's Sky (initial release: 2016, last update: late 2021, on its fifth anniversary) is anyone's guess, it's Windows-only and I'm a Mac girl, and even if I had something to play it on I'm not too interested in spending $45 on what is likely to be disaster tourism. (Edit: apparently it is pretty good for people who enjoy pretending to be a long-haul space pilot, so my “disaster tourism” projection was completely wrong. Yay!)
Also this made me curious what Mr. Smart's up to right now and, sigh, the latest article on his blog is him declaring the inevitability of blockchain gaming; he's even repeating the line about how NFTs will let you move stuff between different games.
It's a fantastic game if you have friends to play with, or are interested in joining online groups. There's thousands of planets out there and I still get excited when I'm in a random galaxy and find something awesome I can share with the community.
The single player in NMS is less fun than Multiplayer, but if you are down for what is basically space minecraft I still would say it's worth it!
And for anyone wondering, it works great on Proton and the devs are maintaining support for Proton as well (thanks, Steam Deck!)
The dogfighting module is pretty polished, it's fun to run on the flight simulator and VR headset. It's my go to space sim as there's nothing that compares even though it's not done.
The persistence module is fun to dick around with, the seamless landing on a planet and exploring is cool as shit.
I don't have a rig to power the FPS module very well so I can't give a fair review, but the mechanics and controls seem fine.
Love the immersion and I follow it asynchronously. They're still going at it and I applaud the effort. Would rather have a great game eventually than a shit dead game a year ago.
I have 100+ hours, and yes it fracking sucks when you spend half an hour going to some desolate moon, to do the equivalent of some USPS worker, just to stub your toe on the stairs and die. Be spawned back Lorville, wait for the wrecking crew get your ship, only to realize you og ship has dsynced and every was a waste. But it is funny, or at least maybe I enoji that masochism of it all. Besides that the game is actually really beautiful and weird, and vast, and lonely, all in one.
When did the internet or HN in general become the gatekeepers on what people are allowed to enoji or spend their money on. We all do stuff than anyone else can call out as wasteful.
If they got rid of the forced slow play where you have to trek from apartment (or hospital) to the ship request terminal I'd be a lot happier. Or at least they could let you request a new ship using your mobiglas wherever you are.
I see a lot of people only showing the albeit awesome footage of space battles. The game also comes with a FPS, and even some missions in the main game where you need to inspect some derelict ship or space station are missing.
NMS has done a good job addressing their shortcomings in the last years, but it still is no where compared to the detail and fidelity of SC.
And then I wanna mention the other weird fun tech they have. They have face point tracking for your avatar. That have done crazy stuff with spatial audio. Im not trying to stan them, but theres way more under the surface of than the game.
I am glad people who enjoy pretending to be a space pilot are enjoying this one, all I know about it is it’s long-standing status as one of the biggest Kickstarter vaporware stories, which I guess is a list it can finally come out of after about a decade of development!
Why did you word it like that?
> all I know about it is it’s long-standing status as one of the biggest Kickstarter vaporware stories
They've had playable modules for a long while, development is transparent and active. Not really the definition of vaporware.
I ain’t judging you, dude.
The latter half of my post was the substance of my response, feel free to reply to that if you want.
https://thumbs.gfycat.com/GraciousMintyGrasshopper-mobile.mp...
Brief clip of a moment from this game, being played by a highly skilled "pilot".
Too, as the linked video helps demonstrate, it makes attacking capships a lot more feasible and a lot more fun - most games' capships are extremely hard targets for fighters because of their defensive armament and because a fighter operating as if aerodynamically constrained has a hard time making a strafing pass count. Freespace 2 gives bombers shipkiller missiles to help with this, but it's still a real problem with ships that mount a lot of point defense - as it is, those are so good at swatting fighters that you don't really have any way to answer them. Lifting the aerodynamic maneuvering limitation rebalances the engagement in a way that gives attacking fighters a lot more tactical flexibility, and gives a good deal of added salience and complexity to the escort role besides.
Consider this: We need something new - there is absolutely no need for another rehashed clone of Privateer/Freelancer/Whatever. We played hundreds of such games. Nobody has been able to bring a new paradigm into this game genre since 1980s. Its the same old thing.
With the hardware power that our computers attained since 1980s, we should be playing games that are much bigger in scope and much more immersive right now. We are not. We are playing the same rehashed games with better graphics. The gameplay is almost the same and cheap. Every major company that consolidated the gaming space is just rehashing this genre like all the other genres for profit, without bringing in anything new.
Star Citizen is trying to change that. Its trying to create an entire universe in which you can make your space coffee, eat your space breakfast and move into whatever adventure you want in a living, breathing universe. Its trying to put is in something that is worth our time and attention today, instead of a rehashed copy/paste of whatever successful simplicity that was invented in the earlier decades.
Its going to be difficult. Even making one living, breathing space-city for people to experience is like making a singular, major MMO game. Making a planet - even bigger. An universe? Phenomenal work.
It was obvious that there would be needed gigantic funding on an ongoing basis and A LOT of work. It was obvious that a lot of developers would burn out on the way. It was certain that it would take a lot of time.
STILL, its worth it. We need SOMETHING NEW now. Since 1970s, we got CPU power increase a TRILLION FOLD, but the games we play today STILL have the gameplay of 1970s' successful games despite all the new potential that immense CPU (and accompanying GPU) power provides. We need something that will make us immerse thoroughly in games, universes in ways we never did before. Star Citizen is trying that. And its a major step in the right direction.
A game with 10x the level of interactivity does not take 10x as long to create. It takes 10^10.
Star Citizen is the exact opposite of every lesson we've learned about successful project management and software development in the last 75 years.
In the end making a game is like any other complex engineering project. The hard part isn't conceiving of something awesome worth doing, concepting a world, the dreaming part. The hard part is wrapping your collective head around the magnitude of work required, managing and putting limits on that, and successfully dividing up and doling out the work so that it's done in close to the promised time frame.
There is a famous saying I'm forgetting, something about anyone can work on something forever, successful teams ship product.
Which seems like an incredibly reasonable way to approach doing something complicated...
Current games also take 10^10 as long to create compared to the games of 1970s. The effort was put into making these games. They materialized. The next generation of games wont materialize without someone putting in the effort and the money.
AAA projects are playing it safe, precisely because they're so big that failing would be catastrophic.
Meanwhile, smaller games are redefining the medium. Disco Elysium has impressive writing and an interesting perspective on politics. FromSoftware games look technically worse but are teeming with creativity. Echo VR showed me the value of social presence in multiplayer games. And Outer Wilds... oh, Outer Wilds.
Also your assumption that "bigger == better", reminds me of how some people used to think that realism and realistic graphics where the ultimate goal.
I came back to it in ~2019, but again it felt like a high barrier, requiring the kind of esoteric knowledge you'd get if you'd been consistently tracking all the updates to really enjoy. (And there was a LOT of email updates about the project.)
Also what felt like heavy selling on new spacecraft and addons, while I remained confused about what you're actually meant to do in the game, frustrated by the sandbox mechanics & limitations, bewildered by how resilient my ship was and what happened if it was destroyed (pricing was mostly around buying ships, I believe).
I now suspect persistent MMOG universes just aren't my thing.
While I'm not one of those people that spend countless hours in game, I do love the time I get to play. Technically, it's a game, but honestly that feels a bit misleading. I almost view it as a massive crowd funded engineering R&D project. There are plenty of bugs that can ruin the fun, but when things go right, it can be an almost magical experience.
The level of detail and artistry in the ships is astounding. The graphics are like something out of a game engine tech demo, but instead of a far off future, "maybe it'll be implemented in a game at some point", it's here today!
I'm sure plenty of people will read this and think it's stupid, but seeing what CIG calls "Volumetric Clouds" from orbit in your space ship is one of the only computer graphics experiences that's ever made me stop and stare. It's hard to convey the experience through a YouTube video. I wasn't particularly impressed until I had it running on my own machine. Maybe it's something about it clearly being rendered in real time when you adjust the camera angle? I'm not sure. That's not even real game play either! Some of the most fun I've had is finding folks that left their ship doors open, pulling up next to them, exiting my ship to space walk over and boarding their ship to take for a joy ride! Or dropping out of your own ship in a tank to fall through the atmosphere of a planet!
There are a lot of things you can say about SC and CIG, plenty of well deserved criticism, but it's an objective fact they've pushed the boundaries of what I knew was possible with games. Perhaps that's a limitation of my own knowledge though :)
In some ways now I enjoy watching the game engine and graphics engineers do live streams on the SC twitch channel and talk about their work just as much as playing. I wish they'd go into a bit more technical detail, but they're in a never ending rush to deliver, so I get why they're not going to conferences and giving presentations.
Anyways, you don't have to take my word for it. On Friday, May 20th to 31st is a large event and the game is free to play. Kick the tires yourself if you're curious! It's certainly worth a couple hours to see what over $400 Million in crowd funding buys you.
what are some of the ground breaking things they've come up with?
The other is the scale. Examples of games that I used to consider to be large scale are NMS, EVE, GTA, Battlefield, and some of the battle royale style games like Warzone. Some of these are certainly equal in scale, but with caveats like they're procedurally generated (NMS) or are completely static (WZ). SC dwarfs most of these games in scale, variety, and detail. A single system has multiple full scale planets with multiple full scale moons. There's even a gas giant planet!
Another neat aspect is the physics. While not perfect, they're startlingly accurate for a game. Each planetary body has its own atmospheric composition and gravity, which effects the flight characteristics of your ship based on its aerodynamics, density of the atmosphere, etc. Actually, if you just keep flying down into the gas giant, you'll eventually be crushed by the pressure, but the elevation (Not sure if that applies in a gas giant?) varies based on the size of your ship.
The area where I think they've probably pushed the limits furthest are some of the internal tooling for actually building the game. They don't talk about this as much in detail, so I won't make any specific claims, but you you take a look at the detailed reports that talk about what work is done each month you can see a lot of the work is focused on making it possible to build a game like this in the first place and extending the engine that used to by cryengine to do things it never would have been able to do before.
Again, not like I'm an expert, these are just the things that come to mind.
I ask because player count is how I'd measure scale. Not fidelity.
They've been working on this for a long time now and trying to communicate the technical challenges and complexity of converting a monolithic game server into a bunch of microservices in k8s doesn't really go over well with their target demographic. Gamers aren't really known for being able to maintain a well balanced and nuanced discussion and CIG has been burned a number of times, so we don't really see them communicate much news about this until something is actually done and noted in the patch notes.
Once this work is done, in theory, the server side engine should scale up fairly well. I'm sure that they'll end up with some regional sharding, but you can't escape physics and high latency space battles are a lot less fun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31300954
(If you look at the actual progress report that was talking about bedsheets, you’ll note it was from the AI team—in other words, how to make the AI enter/exit beds while interacting properly with the physics engine. Pretty normal stuff.)
But that does not make Derek Smart right—space sims are within humanity’s grasp.
I first read about it on Hackernews years ago - and ended up doing a deep dive on starcitizen_refunds. I watched a bunch of those videos about what a big failure it was. I kept wondering why people still supported it. My fundamental takeaway was that people didn't actually want their money back.
For whatever reason, I didn't realize the game was actually playable. The way people describe it makes it sound like it doesn't exist. Once I read about the vision for it, I decided to try it.
I was blown away. I'm not really into space or space games, but getting into a ship and flying it into space was insane. Probably one of the most interesting things I've seen in video games in the past 20 years. I stopped playing it but decided to subscribe to the $10 per month tier to support it.
The game itself is playable and fun (they need to tweak a bunch of economic parameters once they're ready to leave alpha, because right now it's too easy), the MMO part is lacking (and it's an unsolvable problem based on their current vision). There are tons of bugs. Some of the simplest things don't work at all, like the overworld map, or even the game downloader. In spite of all that, it's fascinating. You don't get worldwide meetups, videos like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRP9A8VQwIU or other Beatlemania fanaticism for other games for a reason.
The biggest thing is that Star Citizen is meant to be a high-fidelity simulator first and a game second. There are tons of people in the community who don't realize this and just want another pew-pew, instant-gratification space shooter game (of which there are many) with good graphics. Those are the loudest people with the least understanding of the vision.
Here's what I think needs to happen:
1) Put out the single-player version. This could realistically be done in a couple years and will surpass every space game ever made
2) Get rid of "sharding" completely, add caps to number of online players.
3) Change the mechanics for the MMO in a way that makes server meshing make sense. Develop some game mechanism similar to Asheron's Call portal storm that prevents mass gatherings of more than the server max.
AND/OR
3) Something crazy like create a city-based MMO. Make Star Citizen ISP in NYC, pilot the MMO there. Would solve some of the networking issues.
A lot of what Raph Koster has talked about in the past 20 years is being created in Star Citizen. It's the only thing that comes close to the vision of a "world" rather than a "game", that UO was able to capture.
Anyhow. Here's something from the good days of Something Awful
https://youtu.be/tIn1_9YvGds