As Star Citizen‘s development continues and its war chest inflates exponentially (and sometimes comically), it has collected a fair number of critics who feel the game will never reach its lofty goals — if it gets released at all. It’s gotten too wild however for the game’s director, Ben Lesnick, who recently decided to tackle things head on with a rather long forum post.
While Star Citizen has given us some utterly lovely content to enjoy, it’s also hit a few walls as its scope ever burgeons. You can understand that those invested in the expansive space sim might be worried about the title’s direction, but their fears should be quelled somewhat by Lesnick’s efforts.
The developer does his best to answer the most pressing concerns voiced by the game’s community. Blue over at Blue’s News has done a wonderful job of highlighting the key points, which I’ll replicate here:
“Star Marine is delayed indefinitely.” — “First of all: the phrase ‘delayed indefinitely’ being bandied around is incorrect…”
“Star Marine is Call of Duty in space!” — “First of all, let me speak out against reducing any concept to such broad strokes…”
“You are spending too much time polishing the game.” — “This is absolutely inaccurate. We are grappling with blockers, not a polish…”
“Feature creep!” — “I don”t have much to say to this, beyond that it’s not accurate…”
“You”re spending all your time on concept sales!” — “We aren’t! Concept sales are something of a slow burn that uses mostly outsource talent who would not otherwise be working on the game…”
“My ship isn’t flyable yet!” — “Despite rumors (and jokes, I promise!) to the contrary, we have not forgotten about the Caterpillar, Banu Merchantman, Xi’An Scout, Constellation, Retaliator, Orion, Herald, Vanguard or any of the others. 🙂 Every ship we’ve sold (and quite a few we haven’t) are on the block schedule and every dog will get his day. Why are some ships prioritized before others? There”s a couple reasons for that….”
“They’re only making assets for Squadron 42!” — “This is also not the case…”
“Sales are down, we’re doomed!” — “We are not concerned, and you shouldn’t be either…”
“Where are the previous web features you’ve talked about?” — “This is a good question, and reviewing our past six months of communication I believe it’s probably the most serious concern here…”
“Chris Roberts is wasting his time directing the performance capture shoot.” — “Positively untrue…”
“X employee is leaving, we’re doomed!” — “As I said in a recent post, turnover sucks… but it”s a constant in this or pretty much any other industry. The sky is not falling…
“It’s not open development!” — “I think this is an easy one to attack because it’s a vague concept; there’s no dictionary definition for ‘open development’ and if there were we’d still argue about it. We see open development as sharing our progress with you every step of the way, and I believe we do a fairly good job of that. We’ll continue to get better, we’ll continue to work from feedback… but we make the entire team available to interact with you, we tell you what we’re doing on a weekly and monthly basis… we think it’s pretty open…”
“CIG is not communicating with us!” — “I firmly believe that this is absolutely incorrect, but I also believe that it”s a criticism that will never, ever go away…”
Lesnick goes into a lot more detail on RSI’s official forums so if you want to read the meat, head on over. It’s sufficient to say that if you’ve been curious about what’s going on behind the scenes with Star Citizen, here’s your chance to be enlightened.
Some thoughts on concerns! [RSI Community Forums, via Blue’s News]
Comments
15 responses to “Star Citizen Dev Hits Back At Detractors, Rumours With Massive Post”
Ben Lesnick is a freaking champion amongst men! The crap he puts up with community and is constantly on the ball… He deserves a freaking medal
That’s a pretty lame response. It’s just, ‘somebody says this thing’ well “Nuh-uh! You’re wrong!”
Did you click through to the original post? The answers here are severely truncated, he gives multi-paragraph responses to each question in his original post.
Ah well thank you Kotaku for quality current affairs style quoting then.
– Kotaku
Blame your own laziness.
So as long as they excuse themselves for providing poor information and complete mis-quotes it’s ok and not their fault?
You sir, are a fool.
You cannot blame the author of this for you not reading the article correctly. If they Quoted everything in Lesnick’s post then this article would be ten times longer.
Maybe you should learn to read before you post stupid things.
I agree, I don’t think the summary they posted is helpful.
He didn’t really adress anything. Become a politician Ben.
I feel more comfortable I only spent $50 on this fail of a game.
Fail of a game? It’s development cycle isn’t even complete yet!
Didn’t you know? All those who rag on SC have been to the future. It’s the only way you know they’re not talking out of their anus.
Lol at fanbois
You’ve only got eleven posts here and two of them are accusing other people of being fanboys. You’re not off to a good start.
I’m guessing you only read the truncated summary in the article above and didn’t read the original post on the RSI website because Lesnick spoke at length and addressed a lot of issues.
Aside from that, mikeockertz and drinniol are right, you have nothing on which to base your assertion that the game is a failure. It was said during the original crowdfunding campaign it was targeting a 2016 release date and there’s no indication so far that they won’t make that date.
As someone who previously made a game similar to Star Citizen, I can tell you that the modularised development model they are taking is the correct way to go. I also know that the individual ships they haven’t implemented yet are not that important from a code sense.
They can afford to focus on the codebase first since they have professional artists working across the art assets. The biggest hurdle to making an MMO Space game with hundreds of systems and planetary terrain is art creation. Having around 10 studios and hundreds of artists makes that a lot easier. When we made VegaStrike our engine had planetary terrain, online play and over 500 star systems. But it had no good level editing tools and very little artwork for all those areas. I’m confident that Chris is going to get this right.
I really hope they do! I’m looking forward to a game (even coming close) to rivaling Eve Online.
Sales are down… yeh.. after what.. $50mil in change? Who cares.