A very popular post criticizing the current state of 3.24 which has since gone missing (under the pretense of "brigading") - what better platform to continue the open and uncensored discussion on than Lemmy?
Original post: Here we go again. I deleted Star Citizen some months ago because I was tired of endless bugs, server issues, invisible asteroids, the Hull-C appearing in random places, and many other "beautiful" things Star Citizen could offer.
I thought, "Okay, let's wait for the next patch; maybe there will be improvements." (Silly me.) And yesterday, I installed it again.
The real greatness of Star Citizen developers is their unique ability to create more bugs in each new version than there were before.
First, the cargo elevators. After a couple of minutes of playing, I lost my first container, which fell through the floor.
After some painful minutes, I managed to load my 8 SCU container with some stuff from Orison and brought it to Seraphim. I placed the container into the elevator's grid and sent the elevator down.
And... my container vanished inside the greedy station. I searched for it in various interfaces for some time without any luck, and then I gave up. "Okay, let's do some bounty missions," was my next idea.
I accepted the ERT mission around Yela, and as you can guess, that was broken too. No mission marker appeared for the bounty. Maybe they decided to make the game so realistic that we have to find bounties in asteroid belts without any clues. But no, it’s just another bug.
"Okay then, maybe the cargo missions work?" So I accepted the trial haul mission to deliver 11 SCU from Seraphim to Orison. And guess what? Nothing worked again. The warehouse or the elevator had no idea of any mission. :)
So, we got another broken release. Even more things are broken, and new things simply don’t work. This is the start of a new cycle. Now, the backers will scroll through the spectrum, waiting for another "magic" release that will fix everything.
So basically, that’s how Star Citizen works.
And the "Shit of the Year" award goes again to Star Citizen.
I'm a developer myself and work in a company with a revenue of $7.0B in 2023. We created and support the API that is used by millions of US citizens. We create bugs as well—this is the unfortunate part of development. But people will simply stop paying if our API becomes too buggy or if we introduce more bugs than we fix with every new release. Because people are not idiots to pay for something broken.
That, of course, is with the exception of the most dedicated Star Citizen fans who are so loyal that they will downvote this post while eating a pile of shit from SC developers. Bon appétit, fellas. :)
Honestly, if you're not able to see through the issues and understand the underlying vision at this time then take a break. Everyone who has put any money into it has seen something in there, but the state of the game wanes and waxes, just wait longer if this is still not the patch for you.
I don't know if server meshing will be the magical fix, but personally I play this game maybe 6 weeks a year for a whole stint, but enough bugs that I need to take a break, and then finally jump back in when I'm ready.
It's not healthy to allow yourself to death spiral in frustration, just don't think about it for a good while, and then check in where it's at then.
The game is in active development, and I can tell you as both a regular software developer, and a games developer - games are a completely different beast, and generally come together at the very last moment even on the best projects.
I think this is what makes the game seem less shit to me. I didn't back the game because I wanted Chris Roberts' fever dream to become a reality, I backed the game because I wanted to play the alpha. I know this thought process won't help original backers since they basically just pre orded the finished product and didn't want this buggy mess, but knowing I was paying for a buggy alpha before even getting the game seems to have made it a lot more enjoyable for me.
I have also been very lucky with the bugs this patch. The only severe bug I've encountered is the new hauling missions not working. I know that Orison hangars are bugged as well, because I was ferrying people up to sepharim in my aurora lol.
Games are a software project, nothing more, nothing less.
Idiots like jared try to deny this and come up with tactics trial and error as normal part of the development process.
If you develop software with trial and error, you are already on a wood way (germans used to say). If you need to summon the "games are special" vibe you dont care about software engineering the slightest and your output will be pure shit on many occasions.
Sounds like you've never worked on a game. All software is developed with some level of trial and error, and if you were really a software engineer you'd know that.
Games involve art design, sound design, systems design, and game design. Most software involves a single design philosophy trying to reach a specific objective. Software you can usually take a look at early and with caveats get an idea how it will work together. Games you can't do that with so easily - that's why there's a specific term for it called a vertical slice.
You wouldn't need a vertical slice if you could just look at any point of the game being developed and get an idea where it's going.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that you often can't be sure if a design will work or will fall flat, software is generally less volatile than that.
Same here. Discovered the game a few years ago, subscribed and bought some ships. But I still see SC as a tech demo at this point and not something I can play all year around. I see its potential and hope they pull it off but until that time I have no reason to put more time into it other than checking out a new patch every now and then.
Hoping for a beta within the next two years, if not I will probably lose interest completely.