What does Cred Forums think about Kotaku's article on Star Citizen's development?

What does Cred Forums think about Kotaku's article on Star Citizen's development?
kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen

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>What does Cred Forums think about Kotaku

1. I'm pretty sure this is Kotaku UK, which is Future Publishing, and operates differently to the US version
2. It's actually an interesting piece of legit long-form journalism

pastebin it stupid

>Kotaku

How to kill a thread before it's even alive 101

>Defending Kotaku

How to be a fucking faggot holy shit 101

If that will make you happy then sure: pastebin.com/XV64arRv

What happened with that journalist the Scam Citizen devs said they were suing?

bump you cunts

haha

okay

weirdly, this article makes me want to put my $50 into this clusterfuck just to say i did

Here, I'll TL;DR it for you.

>We interviewed a bunch of people who worked on this game
>"This shit is mad fucked, and this game is never coming out" they all agreed. "Also Chris Roberts is an egomaniac."
>We then interviewed Chris Roberts
>"None of them have any idea what they're taking about because I'm a genius" he said. "All my other games failed because the scope was too big, but that won't happen this time because I have money"

Pretty much.

I think the big management clusterfuck was not having a single team, focused on developing vertical slices with clear specifications and goals, and expanding outwards. Balancing all the juggling balls was always going to become a fucking mess

not OP but the article is 7500 words so it has to be good

If this game fails, it will be the end of kickstarter.

Kotaku did the write up on Denis Dyack, didn't they? That was a great article going over what made Silicon Knoghts fall from grace.

that tl;dr is awful
it's more that Roberts got rid of management he disliked because they were "shortsighted" and replaced them with people who don't use words like "impossible" and can adhere to Roberts' vision of constant creep
coupled with the shit from developing infrastructure for 300+ employees across 4 branches and all the software pipeline fuckups in-between em makes it incredibly frustrating to work on true "next-gen" game tied to CryEngine garbage
it'll come out eventually at least

Kotaku is a communist shitrag. They exist to destroy everything good in the world and to suck it down to their shitty, degenerate level.

Communists see things like Star Citizen and say, "wow, isn't that kind of creative and cool? Better destroy it!" They see things like this as a threat. What, it's not taking minority rights into account before actually making itself into something new, powerful and creative?

That's what the communists do. If you haven't understood cultural Marxism yet, you need to wise the fuck up. It has pernicious and deadly effects on culture on every level beyond just "SJW irritation." It is a death to creativity, powerful innovation, and forward progress in every single area of life.

CryEngine was probably a good idea even if they've had to alter it beyond recognition, because it's way easier to start from something than nothing.

The problem was that they needed 1 centralised tech team to get shit working THEN outsource things rather than having 4 studios with ill-defined scope trying to do shit at the same time.

yeah, in the article they mention CryEngine was solely used as a way to develop a game for $500K and they would've been much better off if they started from scratch knowing they'd have $100KK in the bank

That seems naive of software development. No-one creates engines from scratch anymore because it's so much harder. Far better to take an existing working engine and rewrite bits on the fly until it does what you want. That's why most engines are heavily bastardised versions of Quake's or Unreal's

Was CryEngine a good choice? Ehh, but arguably anything was a shitty choice.

The problem is, CryEngine was perfectly alright for what they had planned to do at first, but project creep and scope expansion meant the whole thing very quickly outgrew the engine, and now it's way, WAY more of a liability than an asset, and the entire company could have saved millions in the long run if they just built their own engine from the ground up.

Basically, they decided to buy a car and slightly modify it.
And then they decided halfway through that a plane would've been a better fit, so they spent way more time, energy, and money turning the original car into an airplane than they would've spent just building or buying an airplane to begin with.

>vertical slices
I don't follow.

But NOTHING is remotely capable of doing what they wanted, and writing an engine from scratch, despite being appealing on paper, is so hellish that nobody wants to do it. Look up the Second System Effect.

This way they had an engine to build around, even if the documentation sucked. And they were in an awkward position with regards timing for Unreal (although they should have probably gone with UE3 in hindsight).

I think they would be wayyy further behind without some engine (although they may have been more sensible about their initial scope and studios and had more money in the bank as a result). I think this was the least of their problems, really.

...

A demo, basically.

A proof of concept that's less about the individual components of the game, and more about how they gel together into a cohesive whole.

What CIG is doing now is making "Modules" that are supposedly part of the whole game, but don't actually interact in any meaningful way on their own.
A "vertical slice" would basically have been smaller versions of those modules, with more of an emphasis put on how the player can transition between them.

nigga don't fool yourself

yes kotaku is pure cancer

but if you are that deluded into thinking that they will release a full release of star citizen then i have some magic beans to sell ya too

ive started following up on development progress since that last gamescom showing
there was a really good point in this article about them making really complex systems but being unsure whether they can all work properly at the same time on a populated server
the demos they keep showing are all done in isolation on very powerful machines with no latency and you can still see the insane frame drops and sub 30 frame rate/freezes
i am honestly doubting they can pull off what they are aiming for even with 120 mil budget and another 5 years of development

>direct link to Kotaku

"Vertical slices" are small 100% complete portions of the game used as proof-of-concepts for the final product. A working demo, basically.

Their "Modules" are a similar principle - if they hadn't developed a shitton of assets for them, got several teams to do it, spent years making them and not made them remotely fit together.

One core team doing slices of the core tech and then handing all the remaining assets to be fleshed out are basically how the game should have been developed.

>other games failed
which ones? the wing commander series that had like six installments? freelancer that was practically the Halo of space games?

I thought these guys went bankrupt?
what the frickin frick.

all of his games had to be salvaged by the publisher in order to actually get a product out. He failed to meet any of the goals he set for the game or promised anyone, and while the games were pretty good, it was clear that intended stuff was cut.

Now he's his own publisher.

Kotaku? They got bought by Univision along with the other former Gawker sites. Kotaku UK is by Future (who do UK magazines)

this is what they did for the singleplayer side, they actually use the term vertical slice a lot when talking about it. so at least the mechanics all work together in singleplayer, but honestly everything works fine in the public multiplayer right now as well so that's a pretty dated critique.

yes, and now rather than getting a game with a ton of cuts 'on time' the game has been delayed by two years and has a whole heaping pile of features that otherwise would never have even been considered. that was the whole point of going the kickstarter route, so I don't know why anyone who is familiar with his history is complaining about it now .

But they're FOUR years in development at this point!

A lot of the criticism of Chris Roberts is really dumb
some of the shit they highlighted is literally every single work environment possible
i.e. vice president skipping the chain of authority to talk with entry positions about his goals/vision for the game
i.e. blaming each other as oppose to stepping up and claiming responsibility
i.e. crying that something can't be done cause you never had to do it before
i.e. a boss calling you out for not doing a good job
all these things happen where-ever you go but in this article they make it seem like Chris Roberts and CIG are somehow an anomaly

no game has ever taken FOUR years to complete! vaporware!

I'm not not complaining, I'm warning people that Roberts is a perfectionist, which means he'll not only not release something if he doesn't think it's perfect, he'll continually go back to old things and keep on remaking them because of a new thing they've made. If it were up to him Freelancer could still be in development to this day.

Never trust people to hold themselves accountable to schedules, they tend to never stick to it.

Well, developers shouldn't be talking about vertical slices anywhere near four years into development.

And it's nowhere near completion.

>TL;DRing something this badly

>Waaah, I couldn't do a thing, and told Chris it can't be done, and he was mean to me and fired me, waaaah!

All these hacks said can't be done is now done by people who replaced them, and is working in game now.

Wtf are you going on about, holy shit.

Remember when TheEscapist reported on this and some Klepkek claimed it was irresponsible to publish and cig threatened to sue. Ahahahahaha

The article uses several anonymous sources several who seem to be former employees who may have grievances. From reading the article I can't tell which anonymous source is which.

Also the article only covers the development up tell 2014ish up tell the restructure.