Star Citizen Alpha 2.0

[Dusty Lens]

It's an alpha. ALPHA. Most games that reach the beta stage have just as many issues and arent nearly as polished.

Of course it's an alpha. It's forever an alpha. It has been an alpha for so long that they had to start inventing new ways to label it. Weapon convergence addressed? IT'S AN ALPHA! Dude what's up with the hud? IT'S AN ALPHA! Man weapon balance is pretty much out the window and has been for years whaITS AN ALPHA! So is this the flight model for real oITS AN ALPHA ITS AN ALPHA ITS AN ALPHA.

This alpha has been scumming along on two broken legs since Arena Commander was released 8 months late. In point of fact this alpha scummed right along through CIG's original TOS day. You remember TOS day right? The day at the end of this past November where we flipped past the year leeway that CIG gave themselves on delivering the game as per the original kickstarter? Before they edited it to give themselves another six months, which they'll do again when those six months elapse.

That's not when they projected that this thing would be out the door. That's the redline a year after that point. Come and gone. Whoosh.

"But Dusty! The game is much, much larger in scope now!"

Cripes alive isn't that true. Chris Roberts has been saying "yeah probably sure maybe but almost certainly yes if and yes to when I will absolutely but maybe not in the final game" for years now to everything that someone with a fistfull of cash passed his way. But Star Citizen has isn't any of that. The mining isn't there. The trading isn't there. The basic stuff isn't there. The basic foundation is absent with a few moldy planks of wood laid out under a tarp suggesting that in the future someone might mix and pour the concrete if only they could decide what shape the house needs to be.

The scope creep isn't even there yet. It's just Freelancer 2.0 right now. That task is kicking their ass and they don't seem to care that much about it. Chris wants S42 and his triumphant return to cinema. When he sat down to play his own game it was a hilarious trainwreck. He expresses shock and dismay over his own chat system for goodness sake. So what you have is a really, really crumby cryengine mod that is struggling to keep people online because when you step into a vehicle your character is despawned and you become the ship, vice versa when you step out of a ship you spawn your character and the server now has another entity to keep track of, which overloads the whole kit and kaboodle and no one can bring in additional ships and then the server crashes.

It's magical.

By which, of course, we mean it's a years old alpha that is hilariously behind schedule and failing to deliver on even the most basic elements despite years of hammering away.

While we're on the subject. Amidst the rivers of gold that flows from mount cognitive dissonance on the isle of Star Citizen cultists is my favorite brand of double speak.

Chris Roberts: We will have X by Y.
Community/Cult: OMG It's gonna be Y!
CIG: We're excited it's gun be good.
Community: Ok it is now Y what is going on?
CIG: Threads asking where Y is are now moved to the concern forum.
Cult: lol, asking where Y is? I guess you don't know much about game development friend, these things take time : ).

The readiness with which apologists claim that persons asking after CIG's self imposed deadlines are lacking in any understanding of game development (As every slavish devotee is, themselves, an industry giant) while excusing CIG's casual employment of such estimations and chronic inability to meet them as a charming example of a small garage based company's whoopsies is pretty funny.

The game is always a year and a half from release. The next module is always 3 months away. Late products will be released in two weeks.

Again. This isn't "the mining sucks", this isn't "man the missions have some bugs" or "Man I'm not sure how well they're fleshing out their lofty ambitions for all of the extra stuff they want to do" this is "holy hell this is the basic game".

Delivery in 2016! Feature freeze and QA testing in June! Right? The very fact that this game remains a broken alpha that cannot seem to untangle the mess that is attempting to twist cryengine to do what they want it to do months after the year deadline extension while they ramp up sales to what can only be called a feverish pace and shove out even more hilariously convoluted ships in the hopes that people will snatch them up before they ask what year exactly the Endeavor is expected to be floating through space and how exactly a botany minigame is going to keep them happy and horny.

No, it isnt. Sixteen online right now is the CURRENT limit for the alpha servers, of which there are about a dozen instances. That limit is already being raised in the next iteration to 48 people per instance, and that's STILL in alpha. Tell me, when was the last time you saw more than 16 people in the same system in disco?

The last time I saw more than 16 people in the same system in disco was probably one of the last times I really played. I think the number was around 30-40? The Corsair war was a good time. But it's good to know that Star Citizen is really leaning hard on Discovery Freelancer's netcode. Star Citizen likes to explode because turning people into ships and turning people back into people and ships back into ships is a lot of weird entities which populate servers. Which is why sometimes you sit there biting your fist with rage mashing the 'spawn ship' button for five minutes to no avail before the server crashes.

But at least you don't have to suffer through the ignominy of having someone steal your ship/crash into it.

I've already flown nearly every flight-ready ship in the alpha, and that ship I pledged to the game for initially (the freelancer) is flyable now in the latest alpha PTU build. You're confusing a crowd funded game with a published game, and the comparison doesnt really stand. A published game doesnt see the light of day or any marketing whatsoever until it's in the late alpha/early beta phases, after all of the work has already been done. That's usually 3-5 years into production before you even HEAR about the game being developed. We've known about star citizen from the very start, so yes, it seems like it's taking longer than a game should, but it isnt.

Here's an interesting point. For you crazy people who are still reading this post. I have no idea why you are. I'm not even sure why I'm writing it, beyond that I think that Star Citizen is garbage and encouraging people to spend money on it before the garbage maybe turns into a turd sandwich is a real ass move.

Star Citizen is an alpha. If you want to fly/test something you have to buy it or grind for the right to 'rent' something. This is true even on their "PTU" build. The PTU build is the build that people run through before the code is integrated into the primary game. It requires a separate download (every download of every patch is gigs upon gigs) and once you've downloaded and fired up this unique and isolated development build designed to catch bugs in the new build.... You can only test things you have purchased or you grind for.

But if you don't want to grind that much you can always become a subscriber. Which nets you extra rental currency. Or just buy the ship. The ship is only like $90-$250 man stop being cheap. Support the dream. Help test the game.

Pay to test is a new concept. It's a brave frontier my friends.

Anyways the Freelancer was slated to be released in June. How are its damage states Tenacity? They pretty good? They're in right?

Anyways there are lots of examples of good crowd funded games out there. Star Citizen is a terrible example. Star Citizen isn't being built to make people who use it happy. Requests for things as simple as being able to avoid needing to deal with your hangar because of the obscene loading times, especially when finally loading into Arena Commander/whatever can result in nearly instantly being kicked back to your hangar (with a repeat of the obscene loading times) were resoundingly combated by claiming that ones immersion need come first.

I understand what a crowd funded game is. The new battletech game looks amazing by the by. They're having a lot of fun poking at Star Citizen's ongoing explosion of feature promises. It's really good. A crowd funded game is one where you tell people what you're going to do, they support it, then you do it. A lot of people seem to think that a crowd funded game is one where they tell you what they're going to do, you support it, then they tell you the plan has changed, you support it, then they tell you the plan has changed, you support it, because heavens knows that if you don't the whole thing will collapse like a deck of cards and gosh darn if it wasn't your fault.

Being said the FPS module is really fun I bet. I hope that's released soon. CIG stopped talking about it. I guess that's just part of crowdfunding. It was really impressive when they showed that rendered planet thing at the same time ED released their actual functioning planetary module game. I'm sure CIG meant to say that it's coming for real and it wasn't just a sequence to generate hype and compete with an actual product by strongly suggesting that a pretend one might be real someday.

Man I wish I understood crowd funding.

All he said was that text chat systems are outdated and inefficient. Everyone knows this, that's why VOIP software has become so popular with gaming in the past few years.
It's asinine to think that it wont change, especially when the producer dislikes the system.

I included the video earlier on. Feel free to watch and judge for yourself my goodly poor bastard reading this post.

I do agree with you here. Some of the ships are severely overpriced, and I would never in a million years dish out that kind of cash for them.

I started with the basic 45$ package that included access at no additional cost to the full release of the game at launch, as well as access to the current alpha. 45$ is less than the game will be when it does go live - you can expect at least the 60$ standard for a new PC game on store shelves. Over quite a bit of time, I repeatedly exchanged the ship packages for store credit and added 5-10$ here and there to upgrade to other ships that I could try out in the current model of the game, very recently all the way up to the freelancer once it became flyable.

I've paid less overall for star citizen, at this point, than I ever spent on traditional MMO's. Hell, in the four years that I played World of Warcraft, I spent a grand total of 900$ and change between game/expansion costs and monthly subscription fees. In two years I've spent around 480$ just in game costs/subscription fees for star wars: the old republic, and an additional 100-200$ in microtransaction purchases.

These numbers look huge when you see them piled together, but over a long period of time it's really not that big an expenditure. A coworker of mine spends nearly 80$ in cigarettes every month, around 1000$ per year for something that destroys your furniture, your clothes, your skin, and gives you bad. That's a far worse expense, in my opinion, than spending money on entertainment that I enjoy.

How much have you spent on Star Citizen?

The bottom line is, I'm having more fun and spending more time playing the star citizen alpha right now than I am with other fully developed games. Yes, the 'persistent universe' isnt really all that functional at the moment, but arena commander is awesome and well worth the cost of any of the starter ships.

You need to find better games. I have a lot of friends who have played Star Citizen. Their opinions vary from loathing everything CIG has done to the point where I look like I've a swimming pool full of the koolaid out back to cautiously optimistic. All of them agree that this is not a fun game. If you think that what they have is good or as/more fun as an actual game that works and isn't a series of floating around to try and accomplish the same basic "flip the switch" missions before the server crashes half an hour in (in a good session) you're deluded.

I have followed this project since the beginning. I was a very active member of the community, helped a eff ton of people flip LTI ships at tremendous cost of time in addition to managing one of the largest threads on the forum and the largest feedback thread. My conversion from optimistic, to cautious to critical was not a casual one.

I'm kind of surprised that you didn't see me around there. The Dusty Lens forum handle was on the first page of the general discussion forum for about a year.

CIG is not a good company. They are not an honest company. They are willing to shovel anything they can out the window in the hopes that you'll grab a buckletload and give them money in return. The product they are producing does not look like it's shaping up to be good. Their community is shockingly toxic and criticism is met with tremendous hostility, locks, threads moved out of the limelight and man, don't even get me started in how hilariously bad their reddit community is.

Take what you will from this rant. Maybe one day Star Citizen will come out and it will be really good and I'll eat a big bowl of crow and merrily play it day in and out. I do not think that is going to happen. It sure as shit isn't happening in 2016. This game is collapsing under the weight of the money it raked in, the need for yet more money to fund the cinematic ambitions of Chris Roberts and the lack of coherent design plans.

Do not buy Star Citizen. Do not spend a single dime on it. Not until it's polished, gold, on the shelf at Best Buy/whatever and your preferred internet personality says that it's good and he isn't wearing a new Rolex watch when he does so. People who have spent a bunch of money and really, really don't want to think that the money they threw after this cluster is going to be for nothing but maybe if more people spend more money everything will be ok are not reliable sources.

There are a lot of very good games out there. Go play those.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

My goodness what a rant.

Fake edit: Star Citizen is poo do not buy it.

Fake fake edit: CIG is now denying refunds. You can try but expect a automated denial letter. Reasons cited: Dozens of hours of gameplay and delivery on a substantial number of promises. Read the letter while logged onto a server and see if it crashes before you finish.