Signalis
Member
Such a talented guy who became such a scam artist. He could have somehow managed to twist Microsoft's arm and make a new Freelancer. I don't think Star Citizen is ever releasing
Star Citizen fans sigh deeply, rub their foreheads as developer casts doubt on Squadron 42's 2026 release: 'I don't know if we're going to make it'
nemiroff
Member
Here we go again... This has been addressed over and over again.
The problem with discussing CIG/SC/SQ42 at gaf is:
- The bizarre antagonizing and patronizing tone
- People not specifying exactly what's being discussed
- People not sticking to it
- People believing that there are imaginary fans who unconditionally defend the project's mismanagement parts
- People not bothering to read the thread
They can spend $45 for a copy of the game and play right now. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/pledge/Packages/Citizen-Starter-Pack
Or wait for one of the free flight weekends that allows people to play that haven't bought the game. The odd thing is that after the free flight weekends, there's a spike in copies of the game sold. Almost like people had fun with whats there and want to keep playing.
justiceiro
Marlboro: Other M
Isn't that basically star field?
Buggy Loop
Gold Member
Kind of yes, loading wise, but it didn't cover a planet. In Starfield you can select any point on a planet even if it's a delimited zone. In old Squadron 42 or Star citizen tech it was more like mass effect, a zone of interest on the planet and not everywhere else.
Then they should simply release it. When you have developers saying, they might not hit 2026, for example, is not great.
ClanOfNone
Member
Does Squadron 42 feature branching story paths like Wing Commander or do you replay a mission until you beat it?
The 2026 date is for the single player game Squadron 42. The alpha of the MMO Star Citizen is what people are playing. They are different games that will be sharing the game engine, models, etc.
Even when SQ42 is released, SC will not be released in a final state yet. Your original complaint is there is nothing to show for it, while there is something out there that anyone can play. You must have never purchased an early access game which is a game that's still under development.
If you want a finished game, just stay way and jump in whenever the release happens if the game interests you. But you and all the other people who just shout "scam" have no knowledge of game development. There are weekly dev diaries covering the work that's being done, and the project boards and bug boards are open to the public so you can watch as features are being implemented, or issues are fixed. The differences with this project is its all out in the open instead of being behind closed doors.
"Have no knowledge of game development" (LOL).
I've been in the games industry for the past 20 years and fully understand how costing and project budgeting works in this industry of ours
What would be an average cost and time frame to start entirely from scratch and build out a team that's currently over 1,000 people building out a full technology stack from scratch and developing a cinematic MMO doing things no other product on the market does?"Have no knowledge of game development" (LOL).
I've been in the games industry for the past 20 years and fully understand how costing and project budgeting works in this industry of ours
ClanOfNone
Member
What bothers me the most is that none of this was in the original pitch. Wing Commander fans got sidelined for all this mmo bloat and things they never asked for or wanted, the original project was effectively shanghaied by its own creator.
Squadron 42 should've been the proof of concept and they could've launched from that. Instead we get this dozen year plus dev cycle that plays out like a circus. Even if the game is more magnificent than Sydney Sweeney's rack it doesn't justify the massive costs and development period at this point.
Poppinfresh
Gold Member
Absolutely, this.
SQ42 should have been the proof of concept, or alternatively, they should have delivered the game as originally pitched in the Kickstarter and then built on all the bloat they wanted post-release.
Dalbajobas
Member
In today's gaming scene prob 15-20 years.
Poppinfresh
Gold Member
Not sure if this has been mentioned yet or not, but the entire Wing Commander franchise, including Privateer (9 games, 10 if you count Super Wing Commander for SNES) was developed and released between 1990 and 1997.
Chris Roberts also managed to release Strike Commander during that same time period.
Chris Roberts also managed to release Strike Commander during that same time period.
RAIDEN1
Member
What I find fascinating though is that Wing Commander 2 especially was never widely released across many formats unlike the original, and Wing Commander 2 was in development for the SNES but never got released, it would be great if there was ever some sort of released footage of how far they got with it...30 years on we don't know how far things went with that....it was also planned for the Genesis, but I think that was just as an announcement..* edit- reading further about it, apparently a finished master copy for the SNES was done and provided to "Pony Canyon" (whoever they are) in Japan...but it never got released...so it's definitely "out-there"...
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diffusionx
Gold Member
Except the original pitch wasn't to build out a team that's currently over 1,000 people building out a full technology stack from scratch and developing a cinematic MMO doing things no other product on the market does. It was to make a modern as of 2012-2014 Wing Commander spiritual successor.
PurePlatinum
Member
I'm sorry but if you fell for this shit it's 100% ur fault.
Dr.Morris79
Gold Member
Can't wait to play it
Dafegamer
Member
Lol one of the Games promising aspects at the time, was achieving Groundbreaking visuals without cutting corners by Multiplat console releases. Basically a new Crysis premise by the devs. It would be funny that once the Game actually releases, the Ingame visuals are nothing to write home about anymore in a current climate 
The original campaign before the Kickstarter didn't. Only that if it was very, very successful they wanted to do a dream persistent universe. It was, so they then did a Kickstarter which has "persistent universe" all over it and way more people bought in.
There was a poll for backers, get a basic SQ42 out and then work on SC. Or take their time and develop together for far better games. The later was chosen and backers were offered the ability to get a refund for several years if they didn't want to wait.
Good we're still 2-3 years under the low end of that estimate. With a buffer or 7-8 years to get the finalized MMO piece out.
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Buggy Loop
Gold Member
Web archives says otherwise. Peoples forget that they were originally the same game. Single player SQ42 would drop you into the PU after. They were sold as one product.
The original pitch
Star Citizen | Roberts Space Industries
October 2012 GDC panel also where he says that the PU is the bigger thing CR also hopes to work on.
Imagine, the initial funding was $2M. Sure they could have make a freespace clone with that and everyone now all those years later can say "this would have been fine!", but in the end, everyone was happy to overfund this project and get the bigger scope goals too. Saying we keep the initial goal that was at $2M and pocket the >$20M funding from all the excited gamers would also have looked odd, that's not how kickstarters back then worked with the infinite ladder goals.
Anyway, it is what it is.
For starters, you don't need 1,000 people to create a game. Nowhere near that much. Art team (concept, 3D, etc), production (a few producers and associate producers), game design (quite a bit), programmers, UI engineering (usually around two) sound, UX (really small amount), QA (often the largest team, to be honest with you but again, tends to be outsourced) etc. The teams I've worked on range from around 80 to 400 - stretched to 500 - maybe 550 - when you bring on short-term contractors (for some of the larger AAA titles). Cinematics are usually done by an in-house team but can sometimes be outsourced. Blizzard's cinematics team is legendary, for example.
Secondly, they didn't build an "engine from scratch". They used Amazon Lumberyard, which itself was based on CryEngine, to which they now refer to this heavily modded engine as StarEngine.
Once launched, the team can be reduced with people there to either maintain or create additional content.
Now, development costs can be huge (Black Ops reached $700 million, for example) but that is a three-year cycle and time is always short. For Star Citizen, they've promised delivery now for quite a while and it's clear that feature-creep is probably the biggest culprit, to be honest with you. It would have been better to launch with their actual fully-complete game within scope and then rapidly expand on this, as per Elite Dangerous, for example. They released a great base game and have expanded on it an insane amount (I still play to this day from day 1).
Anyway, hope this helps.
It started as CryEngine and moved to Lumberyard. I think those are the same but license was changed. Then they modded and rewrote most of it to support the universe level scale they were going for. It's more like akin to how the modern Call of Duty engine called IW is so dis-removed from the Quake III engine it was originally based on.For starters, you don't need 1,000 people to create a game. Nowhere near that much. Art team (concept, 3D, etc), production (a few producers and associate producers), game design (quite a bit), programmers, UI engineering (usually around two) sound, UX (really small amount), QA (often the largest team, to be honest with you but again, tends to be outsourced) etc. The teams I've worked on range from around 80 to 400 - stretched to 500 - maybe 550 - when you bring on short-term contractors (for some of the larger AAA titles). Cinematics are usually done by an in-house team but can sometimes be outsourced. Blizzard's cinematics team is legendary, for example.
Secondly, they didn't build an "engine from scratch". They used Amazon Lumberyard, which itself was based on CryEngine, to which they now refer to this heavily modded engine as StarEngine.
Once launched, the team can be reduced with people there to either maintain or create additional content.
Now, development costs can be huge (Black Ops reached $700 million, for example) but that is a three-year cycle and time is always short. For Star Citizen, they've promised delivery now for quite a while and it's clear that feature-creep is probably the biggest culprit, to be honest with you. It would have been better to launch with their actual fully-complete game within scope and then rapidly expand on this, as per Elite Dangerous, for example. They released a great base game and have expanded on it an insane amount (I still play to this day from day 1).
Anyway, hope this helps.
Elite Dangerous is also a horrible comparison. It released appearing to be an ocean wide, but once you stepped in it, you noticed it was a shallow puddle deep. Even in its alpha state Star Citizen has more technically advanced features that never ended up making it to Elite. I'm surprised you still play, most people seem annoyed with it and left years ago.
Elite dangerous launched as a full game with zero planet exploration. But the full game was there (could explore the galaxy, trade etc. etc). They built upon it and now you can land on the planets etc.
The reason I used that as an example is because it never ove-promised and under-delivered. David had an idea and a multi-year plan, which they stuck to. Now, don't get me wrong, there are a few things in ED that I would have changed, for sure, but as a comparison, it's perfect.
Also, regarding the engine. Yes, a modified engine is heavily modified but the base engine is there, you don't need to start from scratch.
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Buggy Loop
Gold Member
I'm a long time backer of ED and since Alpha I played it, including VR, HOTAS and the whole thing.
It over-promised and under-delivered my man. Just look at their concept arts for planets with cities, earth-like with atmosphere and civilization. Never got anywhere near that. It's a nice terrain generator with virtually nothing on it. I had the $300 DLC lifetime package and it amounted to nothing.
I also thought that ED was the way to go compared to Star Citizen back a decade ago and I used to even laugh at the SC feature creep, I was a backer of SC too since around the same time but I couldn't believe how big it got.
Nowadays? I kind of want the aim for the sky "lottery" ticket. Frontier and the way they managed Elite dangerous was very "safe" and with curbed ambition. Now they have a completely outdated engine holding itself together with duct tape, lost all funding to ever revamp it to give what the players want, Frontier is in a collapse with >$20M debt and Braben had to step away from ED.
In star citizen's case its way deep the cut. There was effectively no engine choices to make what they wanted anyway at the time, but picking crytek was effectively to move rapidly from the demo to the first in player's hands experiences such as the hangar. It was SO MUCH crytek back then that the <USE> icon was from Crysis.
They rewrote effectively almost the whole thing.
Even in early days they had to rewrite the whole animation process to unify the camera rigs and animations to be the same for 1st person and 3rd person for example. This is a very complicated system in engines and changing it is equivalent to restarting development and you can verify with any engine programmers, effectively like changing the heart of a person as these systems are embedded deep fundamentally in an engine.
Then came in the tech for entities, containers, space grid, and everything went from there to now Star Engine which has little to do with the original engine. In fact, years ago it was like 90% star engine and they wanted to get rid of every traces of crytek/lumberyard, which I imagine they've achieved or close to by now. It's like calling Source 2 engine a quake engine.
Star Engine was a huge work and is still on-going in fact. From the server meshing tech to ray tracing solutions software/hardware based to their audio, Vulkan API to multithreaded support, motion vectors for DLSS/FSR, etc. I can almost guarantee there won't even be a legal mention of Lumberyard by Squadron 42 release. If anything remains of that it would be for the MMO and an handshake to amazon servers at best.
KenaiPhoenix
Member
Lies lies and more lies...
we Star Citizen fans didnt even slightly sigh, we KNOW the game was not going to make it. The announcement was too in time with one of the many scandals and problems that CIG has after asking for more money.
I stop believing in them after the last time they did this shit. I personally lost all faith in the project when they announced a Battlefield like mode (that would have been great because it could have the game working good since it doesnt rely on the black magic tech that is server meshing) but then silently cancel it after selling ships.
nemiroff
Member
See, even if I disagree with some of it, this is a good forum post, and none of the petty toddler shit from some other people. Appreciate the effort.For starters, you don't need 1,000 people to create a game. Nowhere near that much. Art team (concept, 3D, etc), production (a few producers and associate producers), game design (quite a bit), programmers, UI engineering (usually around two) sound, UX (really small amount), QA (often the largest team, to be honest with you but again, tends to be outsourced) etc. The teams I've worked on range from around 80 to 400 - stretched to 500 - maybe 550 - when you bring on short-term contractors (for some of the larger AAA titles). Cinematics are usually done by an in-house team but can sometimes be outsourced. Blizzard's cinematics team is legendary, for example.
Secondly, they didn't build an "engine from scratch". They used Amazon Lumberyard, which itself was based on CryEngine, to which they now refer to this heavily modded engine as StarEngine.
Once launched, the team can be reduced with people there to either maintain or create additional content.
Now, development costs can be huge (Black Ops reached $700 million, for example) but that is a three-year cycle and time is always short. For Star Citizen, they've promised delivery now for quite a while and it's clear that feature-creep is probably the biggest culprit, to be honest with you. It would have been better to launch with their actual fully-complete game within scope and then rapidly expand on this, as per Elite Dangerous, for example. They released a great base game and have expanded on it an insane amount (I still play to this day from day 1).
Anyway, hope this helps.
I have a few hundred hours in Elite Dangerous. It had quite a few good things about it, especially the soundscape was great.
Edit: Btw, funnily enough, David Braben and Frontier had their own scandals and clusterfucks and got tons of flak from the community for it.
Are you talking about Star Marine..?
The FPS portion of the game is integrated now, it would make little sense to keep it separate.
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I fully understand where you're coming from and agree with many instances. The reason I used ED as an example because it's a very similar title and, as I said, released as a full game but with the knowledge that it was going to be continually worked on. That's the key difference, to be honest with you. Also, the Star Citizen developers had a big layoff in 2023 and 2024. That alone doesn't bode well for a project that is $800 million in development costs.
You're right about the engine being so heavily modified that very little of the original code still exists. However, they weren't starting from scratch, that's the key thing. The basis and foundation was already there and whatever libraries etc so you don't need to do everything from scratch, which saves a lot of time. But there will still be limitations to what that engine can do and COD is a great example. A heavily modded id Tech 3 engine that ended up being a collection of unique, studio-specific technologies built upon that original architecture. The same with Star Citizen. They will be building on the original architecture
Now, don't get me wrong. SC looks absolutely amazing and yes, I will definitely play it when it is "released" because I love Elite Dangerous and need something new.
If you've already sunk money into SC, then you've clearly enjoyed your experience so far, which is what is important.
Singular7
Member
I'm about $200-ish deep -- love the game and its finally become consistently playable, there are genuinely unique experiences to be had.
Main issues from my view, original backer, play it every patch, yada yada:
- being an alpha, there are wipes, so all of the grind is pointless from a "building the account" view. kills incentive to collect stuff, items, gear, etc
- sometimes a bug will bite you that wastes hours of play, very disheartening
Main issues from my view, original backer, play it every patch, yada yada:
- being an alpha, there are wipes, so all of the grind is pointless from a "building the account" view. kills incentive to collect stuff, items, gear, etc
- sometimes a bug will bite you that wastes hours of play, very disheartening
nemiroff
Member
Btw, here's a pretty good video about the history of it:
Edit: Wait, hmm, what he said about dynamic server meshing isn't very precise, it's way oversimplified.
In case someone is wondering, here's what dynamic server meshing is (text cleaned up by AI bot to better clarify the point):
- Server meshing connects multiple servers into a seamless experience, so players can interact even if they're technically on different servers.
- Static server meshing pre-assigns servers to zones (e.g., one for a planet, one for a city).
- Dynamic server meshing goes further: it reacts in real time to player density and activity. If 2,000 players crowd into one area, the system subdivides that zone across multiple servers to maintain performance.
- Players can shoot, trade, and interact across server boundaries without knowing it—that's the magic.
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Buggy Loop
Gold Member
I basically backed every space games of that era to see where the chips may fall. All kinds of scope, all kinds of approaches. Its my favorite genre along with flight sims. While I backed SC in 2012, I actually didn't really go into SC until 2023 ish? I had tried the hangar demo back in the days and performance was absolute dogshit is what I remember. I was very busy before that with life but also it was a couple of patches in 3.2x that got me excited and the citizencon 2023 hyped me up to play and a gameplay loop got me addicted for a while. I loved my time with it, still do, but I can understand someone who has been in the PTU since 2016 or something might be fed up.
I fully understand the doubt, the no support till its released, etc.
I don't even recommend Star Citizen to friends I have, because it's too long of a story to explain the jank and its really not user friendly to begin with, I'm hopeful one day they hammer down the jank and revamp the tutorial then I'll probably not be ashamed to show it.
Hell I said many times in SC threads on this very forum that I don't recommend jumping in it unless you tried a free weekend and find fun even with its quirks and problems. I'm really not here to pitch the game to anyone. I just don't like when the conversation becomes easy one liners and that anyone who managed to find fun in the game, are purely braindead peoples who fell for some pyramid scheme scam, and trust me, that's pretty much 95% of any Star citizen threads. There's a lot that can be said about the game, in a negative light, especially the early years of nonsense with the dates, how slow they are, etc, we can do it without name calling.
When the game clicks it can something really special, just like I can feel I wasted all my time and curse the damn thing. There's a saying even in globat chat in the game, "Fuck you Star citizen and see you tomorrow!".
They ironed out a lot of the shit such as server errors wiping your night progress and this year was good progress with patches but still a lot to go to even recommend anyone shelling cash out for it. Wait and see approach is 100% legit, I'll never argue that.
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I tried it many years ago but I think I'll give it another go.
Thanks for the heads up!