That reason is I’ve watched roughly and near-exactly this trailer five fucking years ago. You can still find it on Youtube if you bother to look. Fuck it, I’ll do it myself. LOOK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMSGlZSL0DE
And that isn’t the only time, or even the first. I’m genuinely amazed that this grift is so perfect that the same vaporware can get polished up again and again, spinning its wheels in place, and people on the official forum and in Youtube comments say they’re in tears about this.
I won’t say I respect the hustle because I don’t lick boots, but I am truly impressed with how powerful this grift is that it’s self-perpetuating with that little to show for it over half a billion dollars and over a decade later.
I pledged to the original Kickstarter and by now I consider my $20 a solid investment since it allows me to dunk on obnoxious SC fans by calling them “band wagoners” and “fair weather pilots”.
I will respect them being honest by putting the CON in capital letters.
When the Kickstarter was launched, I thought about pledging because I like space. Even if I would’ve only given whatever the minimum amount was to play the game, so glad I didn’t give these guys a cent. Instead I pledged to Elite Dangerous’ Kickstarter, and while that and its subsequent development had issues, at least it was a game that was playable and I had some fun with it.
Elite Dangerous was definitely lib-brained, though: just look at the in-game descriptions of the communist faction.
E:D was an incredibly competent space sim plagued by terrible leadership
I had so much fun taking my phantom out into the deepest edges of the Milky Way, but frontier essentially abandoned the game in favor of some crappy FPS that no one wanted
That’s what I meant by subsequent development, did they think the terrible FPS addon would bring in Cawadoody players or something
“Simulationist”
spread from Chris Roberts to the entire project and from there to its remaining fandom. Thus why there’s ever-decreasing stat bars for everything juggle, from food and water to breathing gas to fucking argon levels for some reason to hygiene now. It’s exciting for a specific kind of tedious gamedad that doesn’t actually enjoy shooting spaceships in spaceships as much as the idea of forcing people to mop floors while hungering for their next mall vendor snack while basking in the awe of their thousands-of-dollars nerd chariots dabbing above them.Keep in mind all that pretense of realism is in a spaceship game where society
centuries in the future uses push carts, hand-delivers cargo boxes, and does ww2 dogfighting in space at visual range with manned turrets.It’s baffling. A prime example of how to completely alienate your entire player base
how to completely alienate your entire player base
It kept around the big spending aging gamedads that often have very reactionary political views and go full
every time Pride month comes around because of brief and insincere perfomative rainbow decals or whatever.
I once considered putting money into Star Citizen very early on.
I was initially glad I didn’t when I found out what an euphoric fusion of Redditor liberal and 4chan fascist wet dreams the setting was, with an (elected!) space emperor of humanity that is effectively pulled around by corporate puppet strings and the fantastical far future of almost a thousand years from now is a bunch of bleak 90s shopping malls with hot dog stands and the aesthetics are a blend of Silicon Valley “minimalism” and Chris Roberts directly lifting imagery from movies and shows he consumed and demanding a sellable ripoff of it season after season.
Speaking of Chris Roberts, he put himself into the game’s lore as
but somehow more euphoric.https://starcitizen.tools/Chris_Roberts_(lore)
Oh yeah and that super heroic megacorporation had a few atrocities it was very very sorry about but in a very cool heroic way that involved auditing itself and declaring the atrocity issues were handled.
just look at the in-game descriptions of the communist faction
“The space commies hate freedom and individual expression and stifle creativity and innovation” I assume?
One of the possible descriptions when a stations is controlled by the communist faction is something like
”Communism is a movement that wants to make everyone equal, although some are clearly more equal than others”.They’re also one of the ”bad guy” factions along with anarchists and space pirates
I take it your choices of “good guys” are space royalists or space corpo-liberals?
the before and after stuff kills me, yeah it’s because the game took 10 fucking years to make so rendering and modelling technology evolved in that time, lmao
Technology leaped ahead enough that new Unreal tools can do The River™ in minutes but dragging along old CryEngine shit from 10+ years ago can do it in years!
Are they still using that? I remember even 10 years it was doubtful CryEngine could handle what they were trying to do.
It’s even weirder now.
After the grifters won in against CryTek for misuse of the engine, they kept mutating it over and over in-house but with weird tricks like the entire fucking solar system in the eternal alpha is actually the size of a Crysis map and absolutely everything in it is ultra-miniaturized to try to fit that map while space is also technically underwater al la Crytek physics characteristics which is why very weird and silly physics glitches that often violently kill player characters and their nerd chariots happen all the time.
Can’t wait until they add the remaining promised 99 star systems, cram all of it into the size of a Crysis map and make everything in it so tiny that quantum mechanics start applying to your ingame characters
they’re using amazon lumberyard which is a fork of cryengine when they went kaput
Star citizen was the game that convinced me to stop buying pre-orders. Bought the game 10 years ago and have buggy tech demo to show for it.
They have the audacity to now say SquadronMemeNumber is now “feature complete” which also means two years more before supposed launch. Again.
not the first time they’ve said “uhhh uhhh feature complead”
Chris Roberts waving hands around intensifies
you would think roberts would be good at arcadey space fighter spin off game given that’s what made him famous
His real love was movies, or more specifically, Hollywood movies. Thing is, “what if movie-like cutscenes” was such a novelty in the 90s that it didn’t take much for that to stand out. He was never actually good at doing movies (see the Wing Commander movie as the primary example) but he wanted to schmooze with famous actors and rent/sell them used luxury cars. Not kidding on that part; that was his business after Microsoft kicked him out of Digital Anvil. He’s always been a bit of a starstruck grifter.
That whole game Kickstarter hype of the early 2010s was largely driven by ”look at all these industry legends and imagine what they could do if you funded them and they had free rein to do what they want!”.
Thing is, Star Citizen is the perfect example of what a guy who’s not so great at project planning does with no oversight. I don’t want to present Microsoft or corporate managers in general as the good guys or anything, but Freelancer actually got released because they didn’t have infinite tolerance for his BS.
”look at all these industry legends and imagine what they could do if you funded them and they had free rein to do what they want!”.
“Auteur theory” has been a lie to me ever since I paid attention to what often happens if an “auteur” gets an inflated sense of self-importance and no longer has anyone else to bounce their work off of. Compare the conflict-riddled production of the Alien and Aliens films to the “behold the unfettered genius of the auteur” Prometheus followups, for example.
I just know that not only is his company probably full of sycophants, Roberts thinks he’s actually a legendary game developer and filmmaker because EA happened to give him a ton of money to spend at a time when FMVs were a big deal in gaming.
Wing Commander may have had Mark Hamill, but the X-Wing series always had the better gameplay
TIE Fighter is one of my old problematic favorites considering you fly as space fascists and it makes the space fascists seem cool.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that game was where all the ”DAE Empire cool tho?” shit started. It was really the first time the Empire was portrayed in a not cartoonish way.
You may be right, and that said, I’d be fine if the Empire was portrayed in a Wolfenstein “real shit actually horrifying” way more often.
The real entertainment for me is watching the people still defending it.
Love how gamers don’t give a shit about anything they’re pouring money into. Every role is a celebrity cameos by A list Hollywood actors? Hard pass
Every role is a celebrity cameos by A list Hollywood actors
A-list Hollywood actors from over ten years ago.
He’s Gary Very Oldman now
Little trivia fact: Chris Roberts is such a laughably bad director that the only character material he provided for Gary Oldman to work with was that his character was very old. That’s it. That’s why he talked like that through the trailer.
Crazy that the game’s been around for a decade at this point and I still can’t tell if was a scam or not.
this reminds me of the first TOS star trek movie where the movie opens and just has 1 hour of pans of star ships while captain kirk looks on blankly. This is not an exaggeration.
also copy that delta removed moving in to dock
That trailer is really choppy…
you should see the game
In Star Citizen, SPEHS is definitely corrupted by capitalism.
