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I've been seeing a lot of buzz surrounding the 3.0 alpha for Star Citizen and am finally thinking about opting in. I'm bored to death with World of Warcraft and have decided to let my subscription lapse.

I know I'm currently at a disadvantage with only a mouse and keyboard (no joysticks) but for $60, I should be able to play at least minimally well.

Does anyone here take part in the alpha pre-releases? Any good tips or suggestions that might not be found in a typical "Get started" youtube video?

I played around with it some, though it's been a while. I think the last time I played with it was around 2.1 or 2.2. So they've probably added a lot of stuff since I was last on.

At the time, flight controls worked just fine with a keyboard and mouse. There was a tutorial mission that you could play that introduced you to the flight controls (including taking off and landing), as well as some of the more useful equipment on your ship. Above and beyond that, there were some free flight areas, a gauntlet, the combat arena (for PvP), and race courses (which could be flown for practice, or against other players).

I don't know what they've added since then, though. So I can't provide more information.

Have a beefy graphics card or you will be wasting your time.

I have invested more money in the game than I care to share

Given the amount I invested I haven't really played it much. The last time I played it the controls were really awkward, both for mouse/keyboard and also for an xbox 360 controller. After playing the Battlestar Galactica mod for Freespace, playing Star Citizen felt absurdly awkward. I understand they were trying to make it realistic, but I think they overshot the mark and were actually hamstringing the mouse and 360 controller.

After a while I got a bit bored with trying alphas and fighting with the controls so I set it aside and haven't touched it in ages.


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 Maelstrom808 wrote:
Have a beefy graphics card or you will be wasting your time.

If you don't mind reducing the graphics a bit you don't need an insane system. I'm trying to remember what card I had before the one I have now, I think a GTX460, and it played fine. On max settings? Hell no, but it still looked good. It plays better on my GTX960, but now my CPU seems to be the limit.

I will admit the game exploded bigger than I thought it would after I backed back in *checks account* 2013. I was watching them get more and more money which was pushing their goals further and further to the point I started thinking it was getting blown out of proportion and I'd made an error in backing it, lol.

Don't still not much of game there

I have a friend that has sunk a fair bit of cash into it and we'd played it in February while I was there.

Very pretty with loads of potential, but stiff and not super intuitive controls. It also is a massive graphic sink. Even on his beefier systems it bogged down.

From my perspective, it still needs a lot of work and needs to be toned down graphically to make play faster/easier. Amazing potential to be sure, but I won't be buying in.

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
Don't still not much of game there

Said everyone for the past 6 years

Do not. Just wait for it to release in 5-10 years.

I guarantee you will not play for as long as those lifetime things make you think you will, and at worse, the game and company will collapse and be sold off piecemeal and you get nothing.

They are burning through money left and right.

To be frank, I think I could put forth a pretty strong case that Star Citizen is the video game equivalent of a ponzi scheme. The kickstarter money seemed to go nowhere but into making a bunch of ships that the dev team then sold for upwards of one hundred dollars. That money then seemed to go nowhere but making a bunch of ships that the dev team then sold for a couple hundred dollars. That money then went to ships sold for a thousand dollars, and now they'r ejust throwing out ships in the several thousand dollar range, and they still don't have that much to actually do with them.

It's like Chris Roberts realized that if he got enough saps on board he could just sell "micro" transactions to people without ever giving them a game and there is no choice but to begrudgingly admit that he was right

 LordofHats wrote:
To be frank, I think I could put forth a pretty strong case that Star Citizen is the video game equivalent of a ponzi scheme. The kickstarter money seemed to go nowhere but into making a bunch of ships that the dev team then sold for upwards of one hundred dollars. That money then seemed to go nowhere but making a bunch of ships that the dev team then sold for a couple hundred dollars. That money then went to ships sold for a thousand dollars, and now they'r ejust throwing out ships in the several thousand dollar range, and they still don't have that much to actually do with them.

It's like Chris Roberts realized that if he got enough saps on board he could just sell "micro" transactions to people without ever giving them a game and there is no choice but to begrudgingly admit that he was right

That would only apply if the bits of the game on display weren't improving. But that's not the case.

It isn't ready for release yet. But it does appear to be slowly approaching that.

Plus there's the leak from a while back that revealed a lot of work that had never been publicly unveiled (and to the best of my knowledge, outside of the leak, much of it still hasn't been publicly announced because the ships in question aren't supposed to be available to civilians; thus, players can't buy them). That's stuff from the single-player campaign that has nothing to do with the various ships that are on sale to the public.

We've seen entire franchises come and go in the same amount of time Star Citizen has been in development. From Software has released 3 Dark Souls games (and a spin off technically) in this time frame, EA has buried a half dozen MMORPGS, and Ubisoft has made so many Assassin's Creed games even they finally admitted they've made too many Assassin's Creed games. Elite: Dangerous, was pitched, developed, released, and ported to three other platforms in this period of time. Marvel has made a half dozen movies and given most of them sequels since development on this project began (and at this rate the sequels will have sequels before anything approaching a finished product releases). In spite of Chris Roberts and his dev team having funded themselves over $150,000,000, making Star Citizen one of, if not the, most well financed development projects in gaming history. To put that in perspective, Wii Sports is one of the best selling games of all time (if only because it was packaged with the Wii), and that game only generated $86,000,000 in revenue. Star Citizen is already arguably the most profitable single project in the industry without even producing a beta client.

Still being on the "we're getting there stage" after everyone else in the industry is already making another sequel to the first sequel to their last smash hit game is like a consolation prize of wasted effort

There's taking your time to do a good job, and then there's ripping everyone off while you laugh down the highway to go have dinner with Peter Molyneux and Gearbox to brag about how you one upped Fable and Aliens: Colonial Marines in the overhyped cash grab genre. I'm sure a full game will come out sooner or later but we're well past the point that anything the developer can put out actually justifying the money that's been put into it, or the time it's taken to make it.

As someone who's invested in pre-release games, my only suggestion is - do you like the game as it appears to stand, and do you feel lucky? I have high expectations for star citizen, but previous experience tells me not to go nuts buying into a game that isn't released yet. $60 american is okay in my books. But myself, i'll be waiting for a more closer-to-release version before i invest.

 LordofHats wrote:
We've seen entire franchises come and go in the same amount of time Star Citizen has been in development. From Software has released 3 Dark Souls games (and a spin off technically) in this time frame, EA has buried a half dozen MMORPGS, and Ubisoft has made so many Assassin's Creed games even they finally admitted they've made too many Assassin's Creed games. Elite: Dangerous, was pitched, developed, released, and ported to three other platforms in this period of time. Marvel has made a half dozen movies and given most of them sequels since development on this project began (and at this rate the sequels will have sequels before anything approaching a finished product releases).

Games do take a long time to develop. TW3 for example took 3 and a half years. RSI isn't a publisher, they're a studio, when a publisher puts out a series of games in quick succession it's either because they have a core game they just expand on so have less development time and/or they have multiple teams working on different games.

Star Citizen has been on the long side, but it still needs to be kept in perspective. It's been 5 years since the kickstarter, I'm sure you could find many games with development times as long or longer than that. I could be mistaken but I think in that time they changed game engines which is always going to be a bit of a speed bump. I also backed Project Cars, a much less ambitious project with much less funding and a team that had come from developing other very similar racing games and I think it took about 4 years from their initial drive to a finished game.

When companies start marketing games at the beginning of their development cycle, naturally it's going to feel like it takes forever because it's the reality of games development that they take a long time to develop.

In spite of Chris Roberts and his dev team having funded themselves over $150,000,000, making Star Citizen one of, if not the, most well financed development projects in gaming history. To put that in perspective, Wii Sports is one of the best selling games of all time (if only because it was packaged with the Wii), and that game only generated $86,000,000 in revenue. Star Citizen is already arguably the most profitable single project in the industry without even producing a beta client.

Wii sports didn't generate $86M in revenue, they sold 86M *copies* of the game. It's revenue is measured in the billions, not millions.

I'm going to use TW3 again as an example because it's one of my favourite games, it's huge and CD Projekt Red has been relatively open about their inner workings. TW3 cost $80M to make, it was however made in Poland, and while I love Poland they pay their software developers a fraction of what they get paid in other western countries, from memory I think it's about a third of what US software developers get paid, so it probably would have cost $150M+ if it was made in the US and then marketed by a big publisher. I think there's a couple of games in the $150M+ range for development costs and a few in the $200M+ range if you include marketing costs (and I'm sure a significant chunk of Star Citizen's money has gone straight back in to marketing).

While games can be made on shoestring budgets of only a few million, especially if the people running the company are also the developers and are willing to put in a lot of unpaid hours, AAA games aren't cheap to make these days. Big teams of well paid developers to which you pay wages for years on end.

With that all being said.... I backed Star Citizen in the early days when, to me at least, it looked like it was actually going to be a game. I backed it when the money they'd made from crowdfunding was still well below the average for a AAA title and before they started bringing out ships that cost in the thousands. Their initial scope before they started adding to their "stretch goals" list seemed much more reasonable to me, you didn't feel like you were buying a ship for $X, you felt like you were supporting for $X and the ship was a bonus.

BUT...

Soon after backing I started to watch the funding explode and then it started sounding less like a game and more like a dream of something so ambitious that it couldn't come true. The rate at which they were releasing previews of content was snail pace compared to the total amount of work they actually needed to do to achieve their goals. It felt like they were pumping more time and effort in to marketing to get more funding than they were actually putting in to the game. It shows that people can be sold on the idea of a game as easily as a game itself.

To be honest I regretted backing it within a few months of when I first backed it, because it was then it started to look like a dream project instead of a realisable game. Maybe it'll surprise me and still come out and be awesome.... to be honest I'd be happy with Squadron 42, I've never been a huge fan of online persistent universes anyway. If I could be bothered I'd be tempted to sell my account, I wonder how much those earlier packages go for these days.

But backing games isn't always bad, as I mentioned I also backed Project CARS, at some point they actually started paying me money, I think in the end I made more money from that game than I put in to it.

You seem to be correct about Wii Sports, and I wasn't even right about it being number one! Apparently adjusting for inflation 3 years ago Space Invaders reigns supreme over gaming kind XD

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Star Citizen has been on the long side, but it still needs to be kept in perspective. It's been 5 years since the kickstarter, I'm sure you could find many games with development times as long or longer than that.

You can but they're mostly MMOs (Guild Wars 2 was in development for 6 years, 7 if you factor in that it started as an expansion pack for Guild Wars 1), or operating on far less budget. Most games that have been this long coming start suffering accusations of development hell by now.

so it probably would have cost $150M+ if it was made in the US and then marketed by a big publisher. I think there's a couple of games in the $150M+ range for development costs and a few in the $200M+ range if you include marketing costs (and I'm sure a significant chunk of Star Citizen's money has gone straight back in to marketing).

I think Destiny is one of the most transparent examples of Western development. The game cost Bungie around $140 million to make, and Activision-Blizzard has invested nearly $300 million into marketing, merchandise, and technology for the full franchise. Development costs for all three games is expected to cost something like $250 million, plus another 400 or so on the publishers part for marketing + the minutia.

But that's three whole games, and the development costs for the games alone are quite extreme with the publisher banking an ungodly amount of money on it's long term financial success. Comparatively Guild Wars 2 only cost Arena.Net $60 million to develop. Elite Dangerous, a game whose feature list is nearly identical to Star Citizen when it was first proposed, published on a budget of $2.5. Tomb Raider was considered over-indulgent being developed on a budget of $100, and threw its own publisher into an existential crisis when they realized how much money they'd spent on it.

By and large most games are developed on budgets within a range of $5 and $50, with only some of the most surefire hits (and surefire bombs) breaking the $100 million dollar mark. That's Metal Gear Solid and Too Human territory.

It felt like they were pumping more time and effort in to marketing to get more funding than they were actually putting in to the game. It shows that people can be sold on the idea of a game as easily as a game itself.

I think the later has been shown numerous times now. Mechwarrior Online and Aliens: Colonial Marines being two personal examples, and the two reasons I no longer preorder anything. Other famous examples I think are Might No. 9, and No Man's Sky.

And really that's kind of my point with Star Citizen. The game initially went up on KickStarter asking for $500,000 dollars, which was probably a complete low ball pie in the sky idea honestly considering everything they said they wanted, but here we are so many years later with a budget that has figuratively launched itself to Alpha Centauri, and there's still no sign of a publishable game coming out of it. "Support us and get ships" as you put is I think how the roped people in, and I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that we're a good two or three years past the point where there really should have been some results for all that money (and people have been making this exact criticism of Star Citizen since 2014). They could have launched the initial game two or three years ago under any other developer and then generated all the extra content as expansion packs or FreeLC if they were so inclined. Instead they kick off most years saying they want more money and have a video advertising the newest ship they plan to sell.

Well, technically, Star Citizen *is* an MMO of sorts. It's an auto-instanced type in which a handful of players in a region (and not necessarily *all* of the players in that region) share space with a number of NPCs (I don't remember the full details). But the "Star Citizen" part of the experience (as distinct from Squadron 42) is a big multi-player affair.

I suspect, though, that the primary impediment for the company has been the feature creep. When the game first showed up on Kickstarter, it was billed as a sort of MMO successor to Privateer, with a stand-alone Wing Commander-style campaign added on. Now it's also a first person shooter, among other things.

There's also been a lot of ambitious stuff thrown in such as attempting to accurately model stealth systems (using emissions, etc...), and more. Based on the occasional bits when I poke around the forum (I pre-purchased the Mustang Alpha starter, and iirc a Reliant), I suspect that they might be having trouble with some of the more gimmicky stuff.

At the very least, from what I understand, my Reliant isn't going to work quite the way that it was originally stated to work.

(note that the last time I logged into the game was when the Reliant was hanger-ready, but not flight-ready)

It's not feature creep, it's the spec that they started with in the first place.

I've been part of dev teams that have tried to make an MMO straight out of college, it never works. These guys are doing the same thing, even if they hire a few people that are experienced devs, if you don't have studio level experience at doing something, it's not getting done. Moreover, the technical limitations of what they want to do are not things that you can just throw money and time at to overcome.

Moreover, well done game development uses a more iterative process, instead of a perfectionist process. Even if you have all the money in the world, you still want to create more systems that work within what you have. If they were properly developing things, players would be seeing a lot more rough builds with more content, instead of these flashy but still buggy builds designed to entice people to buy into their scheme.

Straight up, what they should have done is focused first on creating a single-player space fighter sim, their Squadron 42 to start. Gotten a lot of experience working together and with the engine, then after they released.

Right now, it's a bubble, similar to a ponzi scheme. That bubble will burst.

 LordofHats wrote:
And really that's kind of my point with Star Citizen. The game initially went up on KickStarter asking for $500,000 dollars, which was probably a complete low ball pie in the sky idea honestly considering everything they said they wanted

My memory isn't great but wasn't the initial goal supposed to be a kick to then get proper publisher support, then after that they decided to go full crowd funding? I don't think they ever expected to make it for that little.

Also you do have to make the distinction between Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Star Citizen was always going to be an MMO and was always going to have a really long development time. Squadron 42 was going to be the comparatively simple stand alone single player/co op game.

I think the original idea might have been to release Squadron 42 first and then use that as a base to launch Star Citizen but the money just poured in so much that it happened the other way around, with S42 being put on the back burner.


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 Vertrucio wrote:
It's not feature creep, it's the spec that they started with in the first place.

Again, it's so long again and my memory isn't great, but I think originally they only had stretch goals up to 5 or 6 million and everything after that was added later. Granted a lot of the stretch goals beyond that were just minor things and embellishments on the original concept, but stuff like operating their own full mocap studio I don't recall being in the original brief and I think the first person shooter portion wasn't either (though maybe it was in Chris Robert's mind, I don't recall it being on the original spec sheet).

I've been part of dev teams that have tried to make an MMO straight out of college, it never works. These guys are doing the same thing, even if they hire a few people that are experienced devs, if you don't have studio level experience at doing something, it's not getting done. Moreover, the technical limitations of what they want to do are not things that you can just throw money and time at to overcome.

Part of the thing was Chris Roberts wasn't just straight out of college. He's been in the industry since the early 80's and that's why a lot of people trusted him. What he was trying to do with Star Citizen is what he was previously trying to do with Freelancer but apparently ran out of resources to do it.

When I started becoming concerned was when I started to feel that maybe the project management skills weren't there to complete a game of this size. And as you say, the rate at which content was coming out didn't seem to match any reality of actually coming out with a game (note: I say that not having followed it for the past couple of years, maybe they've released some stuff more recently that makes it look like a proper game is on the way).

Mostly I just want Squadron 42, I was expecting S42 to have come out ages ago and then the persistent universe stuff what we'd be waiting on for years, but we haven't even got S42 yet, with the amount of money they've gotten they really should have been able to produce S42 by now.