Star Citizen is the largest crowd-funded project ever (300+ million dollars). It spans an MMO & single-player game with a dramatically misunderstood development model. This is endlessly fascinating to me as someone who loves the project, so let me spend a few words on this... 1/x

First of all, I'm not justifying 300m, I think the amount is ridiculous, and I'm certainly not in the business of saying developer Cloud Imperium did nothing wrong, but the last few years the development model has solidified and we're finally understanding what is going on. 2/x

It's a project that's been in pre-development since around 2010, and was put to crowd-funding to huge success in 2012. It garnered a huge following of dedicated players as a really ambitious space-sim by the creator of Wing Commander, privateer, starlancer (Chris Roberts). 3/x

So for someone of my age (80's kid) it has huge nostalgic values, I played those games and love space-sim, and Star Citizen is essentially a dream come true, for many of us it's the epitome of the perfect game. An immersive sfi-fi sim in a genuine Universe sized world 4/x

Almost 9y on what has been delivered is a playable Alpha ("early access") game w/single solar system (Stanton) w/ 4 planets at 40% earth diameter & countless space stations. Unlike anything else, you can fly UNINTERRUPTED from planet surface to another surface. Land & get out.

The tech required to make all of this possible is in fact pretty astounding and incredibly unique. Here's a video by Digital Foundry from 2019 that gives you an overview of the ambition of the project and shows you what they are trying to achieve.

Here is a video specifically on the universe scale technology that was developed that is absolutely worth watching to give you sense of scale.

Ships LITERALLY travel at 25% the speed of light around a giant map to get around. No loading or interruption.

Last video they did is on the rendering pipeline Cloud Imperium created to make possible the incredible detail on starships, characters & world environments without mucking up a PC. Star Citizen is at the forefront of physically based rendering at scale.

To the meat of the issue. Critics of Star Citizen point to 9 years of development time and say there is nothing to show for it and therefore it's a scam. THIS is what I want to talk about, b/c it makes absolutely no sense if you have any knowledge of the project, like it or not.

1st of all one thing I'll heartily agree with; the unique development of Star Citizen is opaque & has been troublesome, top-down mismanagement is a big part of that.

But the amount of content generated is TREMENDOUS. Beyond what is in any 5 AAA games and in a detail unmatched.

The team at Cloud Imperium encompasses about 600 people now working on Star Citizen and Squadron 42 (the single-player "historical" campaign).

Those people exist, work and are getting paid to make those games. As @BoredGamerUK says "saying SC is a scam is like saying the moon landings were faked by actually building a real rocket that really sent ppl to the moon", scams don't hire 600 ppl to do the work & make the game.

The reason people think it's a scam is because they don't play the playable alpha and don't follow the development. The Cloud Imperium team is hitting it's stride now, and it has a transparent detailed roadmap now showing every team and their focus:

https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/deliverables

Every three months a new update is launched which ads front and back-end features to prepare the game for feature complete (beta) in a few years. Meanwhile the development is supported by effectively leveraging a Live service model towards it's player base; selling new ships.

There's about 100 ships and vehicles in the game, most of which are earnable in the game by doing missions, etc. Crucially, nobody needs to buy anything more than a Start Ship for 40 dollars or so to play the game & earn new ships. I've bought several ships w/ in-game currency.

As with any alpha or early access title, you are essentially a tester. You report bugs, you have fun you try to break it and you struggle with the many bugs and crashes that inevitable happen. You are part of the development, you're invested in the progress.

But that view really doesn't do justice to what there already is in Star Citizen. If you've seen the threads I've posted before of @WillEatYourRich and @Redistributeth1 mucking about you know that there is tons to do and a lot to explore and that a few gameplay loops exist.

You can mine, do bounties, do box missions (did these as a beginner and LOVED flying from planet to planet picking up and delivering boxes, landing and getting out of my ship) as well as a couple others, some more refined than others. They release these in phased implementation.

This year, gameplay loops around medical gameplay (search and rescue), salvage (dismantling wrecks or pirated/destroyed ships, etc.) and a couple of others will be introduced to the game for players to test and the team to follow up on with more refined versions.

Not only that but a new solar system (Pyro), tech milestones to implement true MMO-style server meshing so that 1000's of players can populate a single game world (currenty it's 50) are underway, as well as the near constant reworking of tech debt and slew of new ships introduced

The most astounding fact about Star Citizen is that the current playable alpha, which already has huge amounts of assets, contains (estimating here) only about 10% of the world assets, maybe less even, that Cloud Imperium has produced. Because they're working on 2 games!

In tandem with Star Citizen, they are making a single-player campaign that features loads of actors we all know and love, and depicts the historical battles/events of the world of Star Citizen. Here's an hour long vertical slice of Squadron 42 from 2017

Here's a visual teaser of some of the rest of the environments that was released in 2019 before they decided to simply hunker down and work in silence until it was done, all progress towards this now visible on their expansive progress tracker.

Squadron 42 is huge, spans a single system with unique content and countless locations by itself, obviously not used in Star Citizen to avoid spoilers, but which has incredible amounts of content already that's still being worked on and added to.

Development of the game is unique in that it's a crowd funded Live Service project that uses an early access build of the game to involve players in testing of systems & tech AND as marketing required for the model of funding. There is no real other way for them to change this.

It allows them to be ambitious & create unique systems & an infinity of content that can be refined almost at leisure & iterated upon, but it has the result that fans wait for long times between iterations or implementation. And a "beta" feature complete state is still far away.

Logically this leads to a lot of frustration and heated moments where things that are broken in the game are broken for a while because underlying tech or planned features that fix this might have to wait to come online, instead of the team doing double work with quick fixes.

Now, OBVIOUSLY in a paradigm of development we're used to. The AAA model, millions of dollars are spent on development & marketing in one singular go, we see a release and then the year or two after another, etc. This is an outlier & open to ridicule & misunderstanding.

MAYBE it's not even an optimal model for the goals they want to achieve, but it is what they have chosen & it seems to be working.

For fans it's often frustrating, but knowing that everything is built systemic & unique for complex system that are coming online, IS cool.

The main point I want to get across is that what we are seeing when we are playing Star Citizen is a mere fraction of the content that has already been created at Cloud Imperium. So much content is waiting for tech, systems and gameplay loops to be implemented and refined.

For example we know there is a dynamic economy system called Quanta which is basically a wanky libertarian's wet dream, that is supposed to tie in player action with millions of simulated NPC in the game world per system & generates automatic jobs, quests & goods pricings. etc.

Cargo hauling has already been a large part of the game (space trucking) as well as mining, so this kinda gameplay is appealing to a lot of players & the idea that an economy is not set, but actually dynamic is a pretty incredible idea, a true simulation of a living solar system.

Examples are that pirates could invade and disrupt mining operations which would inflate the price of fuels and resources and players would be rallied by the system to set this right and others who want to chance it can make a killing mining under the threat of pirates, etc.

It's all pretty high level and interesting, endless systems and features are planned and a great many in advanced state of development (already shown in proof of concept working in demonstrations) but waiting for core tech to be implemented. And that's it, the content IS there.

But because the project had such a rocky start, was basically rebooted a couple of times with all remade assets, and now it's finally looking to the future instead of back (mostly), things are slowly starting to happen, and it's quite exciting what is on the roadmap.

I want to talk more because I'm so interested in all this, and it's endlessly exciting thinking about what is essentially a Dream Game for so many of us nostalgic gamers who envision an endless galaxy of exploration in really cool, customizable ships & experience dynamic events,.

And you've all seen my screenshots, you all know that the immersion (getting out of bed, taking the train to the station, getting in your ship, powering it up, taking off, travelling somewhere, etc.) is just incredible. The graphics stunning & the shenanigans endless.

If you wanna sign up (for free) use our link so you get extra some in-game credits and we get some extra in-game credits (no real money involved) & pay attention to my posts, we'll inform you when there is a free-fly (soon) & you can play with us!

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-Z5ZZ-975G

One of the most fun things is the depth of the style of play options, you can do FPS missions, but you can also fly and do fast-paced space combat missions or delivery, cargo hauling etc. An incredible range of small and large ships, that are so exciting and varied to fly.

Most fun and most rewarding things I've done in the game is learn to fly a space ship with 6 degrees of freedom according to (a feasible approximation of a) newtonian model of physics. It's DIFFICULT! But rewarding once it clicks and you feel in control of a small or slow ship.

The game uses an incredible "Face Over IP" technology that lets a webcam follow facial movements & translates them to your character so others see you LITERALLY speak and move face and eyes. Incredible tech.

See it at work in this machinima (with bugs)