Ah, it recently announced a $48,000 spaceship bundle, the latest in an ongoing line, which contains every ship in the game and is apparently only accessible to those who’ve already spent $1,000…
Ah, it recently announced a $48,000 spaceship bundle, the latest in an ongoing line, which contains every ship in the game and is apparently only accessible to those who’ve already spent $1,000…
Is this suppose to be an article? Or is posting tweets linked on a website a new fad?
I know SC is a game many people like to dunk on (sometimes for completely right reasons) but let’s not pretend like there’s absolutely nothing there and CIG somehow scammed millions of players.
If anyone is actually interested in the game, I’d like to stress that you can buy the cheapest package and have access to everything using in-game money. There are also free flight events, available multiple times a year, so you can try the game out and decide for yourself if you like what’s there. So far, despite horrible technical difficulties that often happen due to stress on the servers during those times the number of players keeps growing. Take that as you wish…
As for the package… Is it ridiculous? Yes, absolutely. It’s 100% worth dunking on.
I’ll dunk on actually calling it a game. It’s an alpha version of a game that’s been in development for over a decade. They came up with the idea of securing funding past the kickstarter phase by selling ships with the promise that pledges wouldn’t be in the final version. The end result is that every new player after release will start from zero in a world full of players with massive fleets. Huge disincentive to start. Additionally, release would stop the flow of pledges from the whales they’ve already hooked (assuming they even keep the promise to stop pledges). With that in mind, why would they ever release? They’ve made nearly a billion fucking dollars and people will buy shit no matter what they shovel out. Pretty sure they’ve even sold ships they weren’t created yet.
They’ve expanded and revised and removed the road map so many times, but the game is still less complete than elite dangerous and infinitely buggier. I occasionally drop into the SC subreddit once every 6 months or so to look for release date cope, though it looks like most of them are reaching the acceptance stage and either quitting or enjoying the game as it is. I won’t knock that per se, but spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a buggy unfinished game is… Worrisome. Especially since the scale is so damn huge, I’ve even met people that said they “only” spent 300 dollars on ships.
I was also expecting something more from the article. This is 100% posting tweets on your website so you can drive engagement there by linking your article in a tweet on Mastodon.
The top comment has it right (for me that’s getting internal leaks). Getting a disaffected employee would be rad. I turned down CGI during the pandemic because, while I was really interested in seeing just how fucked it was on the inside, I could not justify wasting six+ months of my life siphoning money off whales making something going absolutely nowhere.
I’d be absolutely down for a proper article on the topic, especially one based on proper research into the pack and the company (that doesn’t mean it has to be positive, apparently I need to stress that out). Twitter posting on the other hand feels like a bottom of a barrel “content” creation.
Don’t you lose all that in game shit when they wipe the universe occasionally? Unless you specifically bought it with real world money?
They supposedly have been integrating their new “perfectly scalable dynamic server meshing” technology yet there still seems to be just as many networking issues as ever before during say… LevelCap’s streams.
You do though wipes become less and less frequent - these days it can be over a year unless something goes seriously wrong or there’s a big backend update (the only such thing recently was a complete rewrite of database storage to prepare for the server meshing you’ve mentioned).
To clarify, server meshing isn’t in yet - it’s currently being tested on preview channels. Recent update separated the gameplay server from the database server responsible for keeping all of this stuff in game (as in, if server dies all the changes stay online instead of getting reset).
IF they can make it work on the scale required for the game like SC it should not only help with stability but also make many of the planned features possible. For now they need to prove that they can actually do it.
That If is the whole reason I don’t trust them when they say “super easy, barely an inconvenience!” When someone asks about the difficulty of taking this from a test environment to a live one.
Yeah, as if scaling from two rooms and ten people to dozens of worlds and multiple star systems is just a snap.
To be fair CIG never said it will be easy - they specifically said that scaling it up and implementing it in the actual game will be a huge challenge.
In general though I agree, until it’s in the game (public servers, not limited access testing ones) it’s not in the game.
Honestly if they successfully developed the technology that alone would be worth the wait, even if SC never actualizes. Since it can be used by other companies once it’s reverse engineered. I’ve heard some people think they’ll license the technology and make big bucks, but realistically their devs will get sniped and/or it will just be done by others.
While I don’t have any more confidence in Hello Games as I do Cloud Imperium, the initial claims of Sean when showing off the game “light no fire” seems to indicate that they are going for something similar by allowing all people to play on the same planet simultaneously in once instance. If they can pull that off (and that’s still a big If, considering their current multiplayer network instability of having four people play together) it’ll be somewhat similar to what CIG is doing and then we might start seeing other companies try their hand at it independently or with programmers from these developers.
Based on dev comments CIG won’t be looking into licensing their tech as that implies support and they have A LOT of work to just finish the game, adding more on top of that would be a bad idea.
I hope more companies try doing similar projects, even if not intended to be as ambitious as the mythical SC target. Competition is always welcome and can lead to many fun experiences along the way.