Different year, same routines.
Another year, another check in with one of the most belated, bloated and beleaguered perspective game titles ever to grace this gaming industry of ours, cursed with indolence and fuelled on the back of inescapable sunk cost fallacy. If you've ever scoured the weirder corners of the web and found yourself utterly puzzled at how such bizarre fetishes as 'pay pigs' can exist ('in this economy?') then to you I say: at least those get to see the hole their money is being thrown down. Star Citizen is fraught with so many projects and side projects and reworks and redesigns and reimaginings, that one needs a four-year degree on 'Forum browsing' with a five year residency just to have any idea what this game is even meant to be anymore. Was it ever meant to be anything at all? Or was this just Chris Roberts' attempt to embark on a forever project that would keep him busy and stave off that sinking existential despair of uselessness that creeps upon us all in our quietest thoughts. Keep running Chris, but every time you pause to take in the scope of all you have wrought, know well that your substance is but vapours.
According to the claims of the developers themselves, this has been a project in the works for around about 11 years of active production and development, and to say what they have to show for that time is embarrassing is an understatement. There's a game, sure; but compared to the scope they proposed and still wrangle people on with, pertaining to the mythical, unattainable, 'full game'; it's a piddling and unimpressive thing. Sure it looks good, and I'm going to make a charitable guess and assume that in the two years since I last looked the thing up it probably at least runs with something approaching stability now. (Right? You finally made it run good- didn't you?) I would check first-hand myself, but Chris is charging a minimum of £45 in order to play his unfinished beta of a game which has enjoyed just above 463 million in largely independent funding. (63 million of which was from last year, apparently. They ain't hurting or slowing down at all.) And... yeah, I'm not doing that. If that were the way I liked to treat my money, I wouldn't have anything left.
And maybe you're out there right now going "Hey, at least they got out something for people to play whilst they drip-feed it into a substantial game." Which is entirely true, they've put out a thing. But I never claimed this whole endeavour was a scam, if it were I think Chris would have lost his nerve and cut away from this project years ago. No, this is a concerted effort from an overly ambitious man to make project that he has been unable to square-in on for more than a decade of supposedly active work. I'm not saying that makes him a bad developer, or even a bad person, but is sure as the sun is wide makes him a pretty pitiable manager. If Chris were put in charge of Anthem, that game would have launched with the amount of polish of your average Steam-store asset flip. He's a wild mind in need of some serious taming and the 10 years he's spent chasing a lofty pipe dream should be a testament to that.
Heck, we're still waiting for this 'incredible' single player campaign to release within this universe called Squadron 42. We've seen the technology behind the project, watched development goals slip out of timelines and into obscurity and still we're no closer to this key pillar of the original pitch. After a decade! This has taken so long, that actors who were signed up to this because of their Game of Thrones fame are now no longer hot-topic talk because that series went down in flames, they've lost the heat of the moment with all their shifted priorities and unfinished projects. (Who are these developers? Me?) All we get are vague platitude of what the project wants to be, or what we'll theoretically get out of the project. Oh, did you know that your performance in Squadron 42 will have an effect an your career in the main game? (Whenever that launches) What does that even mean? Do I have to scroll through forum posts until I'm blue in the face to find some clarification on the fifth page of the 'Why all forms of criticism is actually just as bad as race supremacy' forum thread?
Talk about a segue way, because that neatly leads into the topic that rocketed Star Citizen back into my mind after an era or two of down time. Recently, word from the main development team has been to lash out at it's many backers who have, arguably with just cause, taken the team to task over the years about the constant empty promise Roadmaps that the team have bought out only to reshape them as quarters are missed. Their excuse: Oh, you guys don't understand game development. Now you know how I get when people condescend me, and although I'm not a backer and so this isn't necessarily aimed at me, my empathetic drives are making me a little flush faced- so let me try and explain as calmly as I can the problem with this. By the team's definition (although this honestly reads like the whingeing of Roberts personally, and so I'm going to refer to this as Robert's words going forward.) previous roadmaps have all been fanciful estimations of ideas and concepts that Robert's wants to work on, not promises of what he thinks he can get done. How silly of stupid, childish, fans not to realise this most simple of concepts. Here is the issue with that.
No it's not. Seriously, what are you talking about? Companies have been using Roadmap marketing to push their unfinished 'live service' messes for nearly five years now and the understood definition of these documents is: This is the game plan for all the content we're going to finish, so get aboard now and you'll be able to enjoy all of this in the near future. It's a symbolic gesture to try and make players feel like they're in on the ground floor, make them feel as invested as those behind the scenes, when really it's just theatrics. When deadlines have been missed, reactions have been negative, because it displays a clear lack of understanding for what the team believes they are capable of and undermines the supposed 'trust' they've imbued to the player by flaunting these expectations in the first place. This isn't a matter of debate or interpretation; this is the clear and present effect that the introduction of 'Roadmap culture' has had on the consumer/developer relationship. Retroactively claiming that your roadmap is somehow atypical to that and that players must be morons for not clocking in on this division is not only insulting, it's disingenuous.
But here's the part that really rubs me the wrong way, and the phrasing which makes me honestly believe this message was at least partly transcribed by a peeved Chris himself. "there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communication." That is verbatim. I copied and pasted the words themselves because I wanted you to read them pure and untouched. Needless to say, it's taking a lot of self control not to start swearing right now. This, right here, is the height of condescending and even breaking that down seems like I'm undermining everyone's intelligence. But trust me when I say I'm doing this for me, not to disgrace you. So, referring to critics within your circle of consumers (because you need to own a version of the game to be part of the forums) as 'noise' and dismissing them as 'Roadmap watchers', is a betrayal to people who have donated money, time and belief in this project and just want to see it be realised as the best it can be. Chris has no superiors, no producers, no one to tell him to pull up his socks and come together (which, historically, every project he's worked on has desperately needed in order to actually release) and all he is required to do is treat paying members of his own fanbase with basic human respect, and he can't even manage that. They're "distraction"s. And worst of all, their good-faith criticism gains attention whenever a new eye looks upon the Star Citizen project and says "Oh this looks coo- oh wait, it seems they've failed to hit their development objectives repeatedly for years on end. Maybe I'll hold off on that purchase." If I wasn't so sure Chris was a hopeless dreamer, he'd fit the archetype of a opportunist scammer so well.
Everything that Chris Roberts has helmed in the past has been over budget or late, Star Citizen is both, and has been for a very long time now. From here on out, Star Citizen is going to stop publishing roadmaps and focus only on the next update, and were this the proclamation of a proven and put-together developer who has shown they can go through this beta process timely and deliver high quality outputs before (like Larian Studios) then I would have no problem with that. We're talking about a poorly managed machine with a broken navigation module, and now we won't even be able to probably chart when they're going off course anymore because the team have chosen to hide it from us. 'We'll take the free funding money, but we're going to hold off on the accountability, thanks.' At the end of the day, nothing real is going to change. Star Citizen will vacuum in the sick investment dollars, those who wake up from the dream-spell Chris has them under will be quickly replaced by other useful rubes and Star Citizen will continue to miss development window after development window in perpetuity. It's the circle of crappy management, and it disappoints us all.
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