Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are using Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine

Please don't post drive-by snark to HN. You provoked a whole flamewar with this uncharitable snipe.

The following links give an overview of the kind of discussion we're hoping for on HN. Please (re)-read them and post civilly and substantively. We're not against campfires, but throwing matches around carelessly in a dry forest does none of us any good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

But... they're not, though. You can at best say that of the original kickstarter backers (a now-tiny minority who backed a very different vision of the game - I'm part of that group, by the way), but not of somebody who's buying a ship today.

There is a plethora of information available about the vision of the game and that is very much because of CIG's approach to openness. They make everything available. They release countless youtube videos, blog posts, etc about design work on the game.

The people putting money into this, they're not preordering a game they're expecting to come out 3 months later, and then ending up disappointed because it's still in development.

And I've seen CIG offer complete refunds (sometimes worth thousands of dollars) to backers unhappy with the vision shift.

On these points alone they're doing a hell of a lot better than most game studios out there.

And yes, they're "promising sun moon and stars", but unlike Molyneux's games, NMS or whatever other overhyped project you can think of, they're constantly delivering updates about it, delivering content.

People will always be disappointed. I've been in the games industry long enough to know that gamers never know what the hell they want, and when they see something they think they want, they're usually wrong about it. Opening the gates of game development for consumers to peek inside, try out the product during its earliest days, is a ballsy move and one that simply isn't getting the credit it deserves, especially here.

>> compare the current "game" to what was originally promised

That's a real issue with crowdfunding. More often than not, the devs truly have no idea what the final game will look like. Much of the early funding goes into what are essentially extended market research projects. Alphas are released, feedback taken, and changes made. Everyone expects that devs have some final version of "done" in their heads, but the truth is that such pictures constantly change in response to user/market feedback.

There are only a handful of indi games that ever developed towards a finite picture (Prison Architect). Most bounce around trying to please all the fans until some financial tipping point causes them to slap "1.0" on the latest build and push it out the door (KSP). That crowdfunding and traditional funding result in very different game development should be no surprise to anyone. StarCitizen will release when they need to release. Until then the cycle of feedback and iteration will continue.

I didn't downvote you, but I'm guessing that a community of developers would be especially inclined to resent apologist rhetoric regarding a 70 million dollar software project that can only produce alpha software with no sign of being finished within the decade, especially because so many of us know what it's like to bust our asses on a tight schedule with limited funding.

I think the SC tech does seem impressive, but when compared to a game in a similar vein like Elite Dangerous, which took a lot of well-deserved heat for not quite meeting expectations, yet still managed to produce an overall fun game that engaged the community while it continues to improve, its hard not to feel like SC could be doing more to give the backers something other than tech demos.

Derek Smart has basically put himself back in the public consciousness on his Star Citizen ranting alone. It's hard to take him entirely seriously, because of how solely reliant on CIG for attention he presently is, and it seems like he's never gotten along with Chris Roberts either. He's fun to read for an alternative perspective, I suppose.

I feel like with 2.6 we're finally starting to see the vision, this is kinda the sort of experience I want to have in my space games. Being able to have spaceships and first person combat in one game is a big part of why I got so excited about EVE Online's "Walking in Stations" and the release of DUST 514. Unfortunately, while CCP doesn't receive the same stress for overpromising and underdelivering (even though they do, regularly), they failed to accomplish that vision.

We know, pretty much 100%, that Star Citizen is going to disappoint a lot of people. The number of promises they've made are ridiculous, and it's impossible to live up to that.

But what Alpha 2.6 delivers on it's own (yes, apparently running Lumberyard), I'd argue raises the bar for what a space simulation game should be capable of. I've never seen a game that even comes close to accomplishing the fidelity of Star Citizen, in a generalized way that isn't dependent on pre-rendered cinematics or triggered events.