from Hacker News

Star Citizen's Squadron 42 is feature-complete, ten years after being announced

by mdotk on 10/24/23, 11:15 PM with 41 comments

  • by CptFribble on 10/25/23, 8:00 PM

    Star Citizen will likely never be finished, precisely because the person in charge, Chris Roberts, is notorious in the game industry for being the human embodiment of scope creep.

    Even the earliest games he directed or produced as far back as Strike Commander in 1993 suffered from delays. "His" most famous work before Star Citizen, the PC game Freelancer, was also delayed by nearly 2 years from its original release date, only reaching completion because he was fired from the job and only kept on as a consultant while the game was finished without his "direction."

    I'm not a backer of Star Citizen, but I see Roberts as a "pure visionary," someone who is capable of generating large and interesting ideas, but lacks the ability to execute. If you search around the internet you will find stories from former employees of Cloud Imperium (Roberts' company making Star Citizen) who were let go or quit from burnout due to the constant feature churn and inability to ever make Roberts happy. As soon as a feature is halfway done, he's already come up with several more that are suddenly the Most Important Thing.

    This is why the game is taking over decade to complete and will likely never be finished. Squadron 42 isn't even the core Star Citizen product - it's technically a "companion game" and even this is only just now finishing the campaign 10 (!!) years after it was first announced.

    Something Roberts doesn't seem to understand is that the longer a game goes, the higher the expectations, with virtually no upper limit. Considering the quality of games that have come out in recent years, there is no world where Star Citizen or Squadron 42 are strictly a disappointment to everyone other than the sunk-cost-fallacy "investors" still huffing the copium of their 4-5 figure backing fees.

  • by mnau on 10/25/23, 2:08 AM

    Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years. Kickstarter was in 2012, so let's see if it will be released earlier than 2026.

    Enough time to graduate, start a family and have first child in school....

  • by civilitty on 10/25/23, 2:15 AM

    I recognize a lot of faces in that trailer. The game stars Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Andy Serkis, Gillian Anderson (Scully!), Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, and some more familiar faces [1]

    So that's where all my money's gone since 2012!

    Star Citizen actually launching a finished product certainly wasn't on my 2020's bingo card.

    [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5194726/

  • by jalino23 on 10/25/23, 1:23 AM

    the server meshing demo is technically impressive, very curious how they did that

    so in the example, they had 3 location authority server and 1 replication layer,

    so each location server can represent a physical location on 3d world, say its own solar system, and moving out from location A to location B moves you to a different server, and that was possible cause your position matrix was store in the replication layer and each server has a copy of replication layer.

    now how do you handle updating all those in realtime is what amazed me, they even have bullets go through locations

  • by mvdtnz on 10/25/23, 1:45 AM

    I'll believe it if and when they launch it.
  • by bluescrn on 10/25/23, 7:42 PM

    "Feature complete" can still be an awfully long way from "content complete", let alone "ready to ship"
  • by bravoetch on 10/25/23, 7:39 PM

    Star Citizen is a most impressive business model that will be studied.
  • by empath75 on 10/25/23, 2:00 AM

    The original announced release date was 2014.
  • by mariusor on 10/25/23, 11:22 AM

    Was anyone else bothered by the "sound in space" trope?

    For a game that prides itself in simulating every avionic surface and engine, that feels like quite a glaring capitulation to cinematic requirements.

  • by pixxel on 10/25/23, 7:15 AM

    Every 4-6 months I reinstall Star Citizen in the hope it’s not a buggy low FPS mess. On paper this is my ideal game but I’ve yet to enjoy it. I have zero hype for S42. Well, almost zero…
  • by darknavi on 10/25/23, 2:13 AM

    Wow, blast from the past. xfire was the shit back in the day.
  • by atleastoptimal on 10/25/23, 7:36 PM

    The delay is simply an issue of perverse incentives. Marketing + slow release + hype = unofficial subscription model, funding increases indefinetely. Adding new crazy scope creep instead of releasing earlier was always beneficial.
  • by 2muchcoffeeman on 10/25/23, 2:33 AM

    Can I fly with a joystick?
  • by smcleod on 10/25/23, 2:08 AM

    Would be amazing if it came to consoles for sure, maybe in another 10 years.
  • by s5300 on 10/25/23, 1:55 AM

    I was disabled and slated for major surgeries when I backed at under 10,000 total backers. Have a physical card something near 7500. I am still disabled and slated for major surgeries. Never know if I’ll be able to comfortably play the game.

    A friend of mine started medschool at the same time and is now nearly fully through medschool. He’s also a backer under 10,000. He doesn’t know if he’s never going to have any time to play, or if he’s going to fully drop out of life (likely) and only be a doctor and play Star Citizen with all of his free time in life. Bit of a neurotic asocial fellow.

    Anyways, I have a post history across social medias to show that I’ve never doubted this game would fully come to fruition. Around 2016 or so I concluded I might change my mind if they had nothing meaningful to show after 15 years.

    The hate surrounding so many things about this company/game has always been exceptionally amusing to me. There are people in the subreddit/YouTube that have quite literally been complaining on an at-least weekly basis since like. 2014 (I say this as I post shadowbanned on HN) They really devote a significant portion of their lives solely to being extremely butthurt about the company, Chris Roberts, and his wife. The disgruntled ex-employees that come out of the woodwork every now & then are wild too.

    They’re still not completely out of the pits yet, but I think people are going to be surprised when this ends up being a completely jawdropping(decade defining?) game. I also think I’ll probably still be disabled, even if I have surgery soon, recovery is very, very long. Life is strange.