Star Citizen Had No Other Option, Staff Leak to Press

We now know Star Citizen's path to V1.0 and the release date of Squadron 42, but the road to get there looks bumpy.

00:00 The Road To Citizencon
01:32 An Outstanding Showcase
03:17 Cost of Perfection
06:42 Cracks in the Foundation
09:31 Vision vs Reality
12:22 Chris “Scope Creep” Roberts
13:32 Money problems

[jamesblonde]

Former CIG Austin employee here. I left voluntarily in January because I was informed of an upcoming policy change that removed work from home privileges, despite promises being made when I was hired that this would not be the case. I was not in a position to commute 3+ hours or move, and so exited. My understanding was that most of the people who left the ATX and LA offices did so because their roles were moved to Manchester or a different office, and they were given the choice to move with them or depart. The general sentiment was that Chris Roberts saw other game companies returning to office and wanted to be like the big boys, so he unilaterally decided that CIG was an in-person company and gave managers almost no ability to make exceptions. This was absolutely perceived by many at the time to be a "soft layoff" by making the conditions to continue working too strenuous for many, though I am not sure if any hard layoffs followed after I left.

[hogfry]

Meanwhile devs at blizzard haven't seen their families since 2009

[obi]

One way or another, this game is going to make we are all just trying to figure out if it's going to be good or bad.

[hockey]

16:59 "Because they don't earn money from regular video game selling." Maybe it's because they've never actually released a video game?

[booease]

Microsoft eventually booted Roberts from Freelancer for these very same issues, feature creep and scope creep. He kept missing deadlines and eventually Microsoft said, "You're are out and we'll take this to the finish line ourselves." No such accountability with Star Citizen.

[benjaminmeusburger]

10+ years of developement
Manager: It is realy important to squeeze out those 2 additional days of the weekend!

[boxin]

Upon seeing the photo of the elevators my first thought was, "I wonder if they work"

[JDLupus]

Witholding severance packages if NDAs aren't signed should be extremely illegal.

[blindalienproductions]

I backed in 2013 expecting to get a modern take on Freelancer with support for private servers, and it's gone way off into MMO territory now.

I've literally had the time to go to college, get my first tech industry job, and develop my own space game since.

[kyoai]

I tried out one of the recent free events for Star Citizen. Usually my sessions ended with my character being stuck holding a box in his hands, unable to let go. Because my character could not let go of the box holding in his hands, he was unable to take food in his hands to eat, eventually dying of starvation or dehydration. This happened several times. One other time my character died because the cockpit button hitboxes have bad hit detection for mouse clicks, so instead of selecting an option on my radar, my character pressed the "open canopy" button instead (even though it was nowhere near the mouse cursor), while in space... the canopy button got bugged out, I was unable to close it again, my character died due to lack of oxygen. In another case the ships controls bugged out mid-flight... unable to control the ship anymore, I crashed into a space station. In the rare cases where my character did NOT die due to bugs and my character actually being able to do something productive, the server forgot on a regular basis (every hour or so) what missions I have accepted as if I never accepted any missions in the first place, robbing me of rewards for completing them. Also, at times the server simply forgot what I have in my inventory. Fun!

Don't get me wrong, it's impressive as a tech demo, but if for all these years they can't manage to fix simple bugs such as "character can't stop holding a box" but instead already have a cash shop in their alpha-stage game with some items costing hundreds of dollars then I have little faith that the game will be playable in an acceptable manner anytime in the next 10 years.

[friendlyspacedragon]

A reminder: Squadron 42 has been just two years away since 2012. Maybe it will launch in 2026 this time, but it is yet again just two years away.

[christopherjohnson]

Squadron 42 also had a release date of 2016 for a very long time and that was 8 years ago. I will believe it when I see it.

[richbuilds_com]

It doesn't matter how much you dress it up with fancy offices and barista's serving coffee, or giving "free team meals", or snooker tables in the break room.

If you aren't paying your devs enough they won't be worth the money you paid them.

If you push your devs past breaking point they won't fix anything, they'll break more stuff. Because they are broken.

Signed a dev who's been through the mill.

[Maestro]

CIG has basically the business model that strippers have used for decades. They don't sell dances to clients, they sell dreams. Once the dance is over, reality sets in and the buyer goes into regret.

This is exactly what is happening right now with development. CIG are constantly selling dreams to people. Watch when it gets released (if it ever does) and all the people come to complain. The solution? Sell more dreams with expanded universes, DLC, more A list actors joining the cast, etc.

[TacticalBeard]

Not a single thing matters until they can get the server tick rate to go over 5

[weskandel]

Calling game polish an afterthought is inaccurate... It's like saying the icing on the cake is an afterthought... It just can't be done until the rest of the cake is in place.

[SomeGuyNamedRoy]

I won't support any business that mandates work over family. As someone that worked at a jail for 7 years, this kind of thing can break marriages. When you quit or die, the company won't remember all the time you gave them, but your partner/kids will remember that you weren't there.

[bradenculver]

I remember being a teenager asked by my dad if I could use my birthday money to buy this game. His immediate reaction was “this seems kinda like a scam”. That was over a decade ago. While /r/StarCitizen may be drinking the kool-aid, there’s very little reason to have faith in this project at this point.

[Dark_Jaguar]

In Super Mario 64, they built the scaffolding of a level and spent months developing and fine tuning and polishing how Mario feels to move. Only when all that fine tuning was complete did they even START designing levels around Mario's moves and exact speed and handling.

Sometimes, the polish should be done in the core phases of development.

Now I know the game has taken roughly 300 years to produce at this point, but if they need to crunch so bad that their employees are basically living at the office for a month, then it needs to be delayed, delayed enough to do whatever work they feel needs to be done in a way that doesn't destroy the employees doing all the work.

[mikeyoukami]

The luxury office really reminded me of the opinion I quickly formed on the subject of Star Citizen (which I also backed and am looking forward to) which is that it is obvious that Chris' dream is "to build the worlds greatest space game". Not "to have built the worlds greatest space game".