Star Citizens and Feature Creep

So, a bit of a preface for this one, what is Star Citizen actually suppose to contain: All the stretch goals, by way of Roberts Space Industries.

Also, a bunch of information can be gotten outta the Kickstarter, so let’s start out with the intial promises:

Real quick, Star Citizen is:

A rich universe focused on epic space adventure, trading and dogfighting in first person.
Single Player – Offline or Online(Drop in / Drop out co-op play)
Persistent Universe (hosted by US)
Mod-able multiplayer (hosted by YOU)
No Subscriptions
No Pay to Win

That, would be what we would have gotten for the half million US$ Chris Roberts wanted intially, those six things are the very default, the base line.

Are any of these avaliable in the present “Alpha”? Well, no, not at all, there’s only one system, the ships aren’t working at all, trading isn’t in and the universe is about as persistent as a Just Cause 2 multiplayer map.

Now, the mod-able multiplayer, hosted by yourself, have been placed in the backburner until after “launch”, meaning we’ll almost certainly never see it again.

No Subscriptions? Well, you can actually subscribe to CIG, supporting the Community updates or some nonsesnse, and if you believe that my son, then I have a fair few bridges I’d like to sell you.

No Pay to Win? Considering that you can litteraly buy any giant super-ship using actual money right now? Sorry, that’s pretty much Pay to Win, is it time-limited until launch? Sure, Cloud Imperium claims that they’ll stop selling actual ships when it goes live.

But the damage is already done my sweet little redditors, now a bunch of whales will have a massive advantage, in theory.

So yeah, game sure hasn’t reached any of the starting promises, a great sign, after 104,500,000 US$ MORE then actually needed.

Now, using the Six Million US$ goal from the Kickstarter, Star Citizen would improve Privateer with 100 total start systems, full Orhestral Music and Squadron 42, the first Episode at least, 16 missions in total.

Not bad, does any of this exist yet? Two years after it was suppose to? Nope, not even a single one of these items are actually implemented yet.

Now, one does wonder why this is. Until you look at the Stretch Goal at CIG own website, and they conflict with the goal in the Kickstarter. Oh boy.

The Kickstarter required more than six million to get Squardron 42 to 16 missions, CIG’s own website, requires three million for 35 missions.

At 12 million, the HANGARD module get’s Occulus Rift support, the hell? Also a bunch of nonsense about Motion Capture facilities and Sound studioes, which is odd.

Most Game Studioes just rent those, not even that massively expensive anymore, you’d imagine that FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER CHRIS ROBERTS would know that.

At 19 million US$, a monthly series about older games would be up on the RSI website, why? Fuck knows, utterly pointless. The monthly promise was broken four years ago by the way.

Most of the rest of the Goal are either useless ships that exists only as JPGs or stuff Elite:Dangerous already did or stuff no sane human being would even consider useful or sensible.

Joy of joy, eh?

While a substantive part of the promised gameplay is now available, we acknowledge that delivery of some game elements has been delayed due to expansion of Star Citizen’s scope. This expansion is a result of the community’s declared desire to have the initial release version of the game developed to a much greater depth than contemplated originally upon start of the campaign. It is inherent to the nature of crowdfunding that such an adjustment to the project may occur. Ultimately, this will benefit all backers including yourself, since every backer will be receiving a much greater value for his/her pledge, but it may – as in this case – cause an extension of the delivery dates.

Allow me to just quote that chunk of the e-mail CIG has send to all refund requests,not the “substantive” part of the promosed gameplay? Yeah, that’s not going to go anywhere in a sane courtroom.

So yeah, either feature creep killed Star Citizen years ago, or Chris Roberts is building a Hollywood production company infrastructure using crowdfunding, which he’ll then quitely rebuy from the shambles of this failure of a game.

Or just incompetence. Probably the last one.