Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

I talked to the guys at Star Citizen and I got them to do a Rerolled christmas special. If you donate $75 today you'll get this special ship for your Star Citizen account. Rerolled gets a small portion of the the money along with a small donation to Toys for Bots charity.

If you order before Christmas, you'll get two. Offer ends Jan 3rd 2014.

Sweet, I've always wanted a romulan warbird.

Draegan_sl said:

I talked to the guys at Star Citizen and I got them to do a Rerolled christmas special. If you donate $75 today you'll get this special ship for your Star Citizen account. Rerolled gets a small portion of the the money along with a small donation to Toys for Bots charity.

If you order before Christmas, you'll get two. Offer ends Jan 3rd 2014.

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I can't argue with their ability to sell the game, it is a phenomenal success. Good for them, and I really do wish them the best. Especially since it is a genre so many of us miss, love and are pining for.

But... on the other side.... it's hard not to laugh at the scene of millions of suckers being born every minute, and Chris has a line into all of their wallets.

I was almost suckered into buying the $110 packet, like I had my Visa sitting on the table ready to punch in the info. Until I learned that the same ship I was getting (Freelancer) was just another ship I would be getting in the game through normal play. Basically the $110 is just investment money to help fund the game. Aside from the "feel good" placebo affect I'd just be another schmuck next to the thousands of others six months down the line when the game is selling for $49.99 on Steam.

I think I gave them $40 a year ago. I have no desire to give them more and now I have Alpha access.

Speaking of, is there any ETA of when testing starts? I gave, uh, $35? at the very beginning and have only casually followed it since.

I waited in anticipation for the yearly celebration crap they streamed about a month or so ago. I was hoping to see all sorts of new in game footage and instead got shown a bunch of new ships I can buy. So that pretty much sums up the eta. ETA believe it when I see it.

That said, I had a lot more confidence in the engine when they were planning on using the Crytek one. Since the start of this game my fear was always that either the net code or the engine would choke under the load of their hi-res model and large object level. They are a proven team in the small group/solo game space, but as witnessed with TOR, being able to code a solo /small group game and developing an MMO are pretty different beasts.

Really hoping they know what they are getting into with a home grown engine...

My concern with the extremely high level of detail on some of the ships is that we won't get a lot of variety. The "world" won't be as expansive, and be as large as say Mass Effect 1 and 2 put together. We'll then trade or grind economy and do PvP for months or years before another expansion adds in another ship or two and a few more sectors. The single player campaign will probably take most folks 20 hours to get through. Multiplayer will likely take place in the same world space the single player campaign took place in.

I don't remember how many locations SW:TOR had. I know that it wasn't that many. With the level of detail RSI is shooting for, I just don't see that many unique locations before they start recycling them like X-Rebirth did.

The player usable ship variety is going to be pretty limited if the current trend continues. They're blowing a lot of time and money on each ship yet we haven't even gotten into quest, story, and scenery content. I suppose the kickstarter funds are going into content, while ship sales go into new designs?

I don't get the impression RSI is onboard with that sort of thing.

I haven't followed his/their blogs, but seems to me he's still stuck in what I call "Mass Effect" mode: Unique locations that take artists and designers a few months to put together each. That translates to thousands of dollars and man hours just to design location X. Followed by location Y. That worked great for games like the Mass Effect series or even SW:TOR to a certain extent (since the WoW-like ground element expands on that greatly). SC is devoid of any "WoW ground" element. It's supposed to be joystick controlled ships in space right?

We have one carrier.. a game like this should have a variety of carrier designs, cruisers, and battleships forming patrol squadrons. There's only one extremely detailed player usable corvette (or is it a frigate?). If the ships are going to be my character as well as the core of the game, then you better provide me with a ton of ship design varieties. This is what's giving me the impression that the game is going to sell very short of expectations. At this rate it's shooting way too far over the rainbow and it sucks that the folks on their forums are gullible enough to suck it down.

Two years with a polygon budget of about 5k for exterior, 10k for interior (using normal maps and shader trickery) for ships and a ratio similar to what SW:TOR or STO used for stations I can see doable. But two years for a ship budget in the 50K+ range per ship 1m+ range for stations given that they are a small team with a less than 40million budget (I believe it's $40 million at this point?) there's just no fucking way.

I'm perfectly fine with creative use of instancing and procedurally generated "sectors" or blocks of space making it seem like space is endless. Making 5 or so space stations and asteroid stations and repeating them randomly in these sectors I would fine with. That's the only way I can more or less see this working. The content would probably be all player driven (economy, territory control, pvp). I just don't see this guy doing that based on the current trend and the raving masses on his forums.

Helldiver_sl said:

I don't get the impression RSI is onboard with that sort of thing.

We have one carrier.. a game like this should have a variety of carrier designs, cruisers, and battleships forming patrol squadrons. There's only one extremely detailed player usable corvette (or is it a frigate?). If the ships are going to be my character as well as the core of the game, then you better provide me with a ton of ship design varieties. This is what's giving me the impression that the game is going to sell very short of expectations. At this rate it's shooting way too far over the rainbow and it sucks that the folks on their forums are gullible enough to suck it down.

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Well to be fair on this point that would not be a launch priority. If you assume those big ships are guild assets ala Eve they would take months to get the resources for so they could easily be patched in. That said I definitely share the concern on the size and scope of the world, it will be a tricky balancing act especially if they are not doing procedural /random generation.

I get the no user content though, NWN's was a friggin mess, let EQ:N pilot that concept for you since they are already on that path.

FYI Chris has described further how the game world pans out in the latest 10 for the Chairman. Long story short he is trying to manage expectations here. This directly answers concerns about both feature creep and world building.

Major trade hubs will be hand built along with some smaller ones by release. Additional sites will be added post launch.
Some orbital stations will be hand built by release. He is referring to the few major trade ports that can host large capital ships and one or two stations that can be player owned/controlled. Others will be post launch.
Procedural generation will be used in concert with the hand built content, not necessarily linking it but fleshing it out.
Exploration will include large parts of even known systems. Procedural generation will be used here heavily for areas of known systems that are unknown. This will no doubt be used more heavily in systems/sectors that are not so major. Major area, largest space lanes etc. will still be hand built however.

Obviously he can't build everything we want for $40 million. No way he can and knows it. I'm not sure what Chris' stand was on procedural generation before his more recent comments but it seems clear that procedural generation will be used heavily to flesh out large parts of the game world. Space lanes and major hubs will be hand built but he is relying on a combination of procedural generation and the automated NPC economy to make the rest of the game world alive. To me this seems a lot more grounded in reality compared to the idea that everything will be hand built. Had they done that the game world would be really small or linked with large empty nothing.

People thought it would all be hand built? lol

Draegan_sl said:

People thought it would all be hand built? lol

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Yeah some aren't the sharpest knives.

Also Chris noted that world ownership (buildings and not necessarily the planet) will come post launch. I can't compare it to EvE because I don't know how EVE's works.
He said they will allow players to own/build some industry on some planets by launch but those will likely be on established worlds/ports. Building on a completely unused world in free space will be post launch.