Star Citizen and you

Star Citizen, another result of nostalgia, together with that abomination Godus that Peter Molyneux vomited forth upon an unsuspecting world.

Now, I have no clue what the hell Wing Commander is, no earthly clue at all, I didn’t have a PC that could actually run anything as fun as video games back in those days.

The damn graphics card had at best sixteen colours, not entirely sure. It has been many a dark and horrible year since.

Now, do you remember the Ouya, that useless little shit box only the mentally deranged could love? Of course you don’t, it was shut down and its intangible assets were devoured by Razor, who wants to make a go at a mini-console themselves.

The Ouya was a kickstarter success, however, as it managed to rake in millions, promising a “revolution” and that it would “save the games”.

“Beware those who promises revolution, because in their hearts, the seek themselves your exploiter.”

Ouya was a miserable failure, it was released, but the end product was such a pile of garbage, not even Notch wanted to touch it, and that crazy Swede sure does want to touch it all.

Now, another contender is reach peak failure cascade, Star Citizen, the largest crowdfunding success in history, one hundred million US dollars, for a video game, designed and managed by a man, who had massive success with video games.

The last of those, from 1997, to bad it’s 2005, and also to bad that Origin Systems was the company who actually made the damn games, Chris Roberts was the designer, but one man does not make games like that, a company does.
Unless that one man is a complete lunatic genius, which Chris Roberts isn’t.

In between the last Wing Commander, Chris Roberts was the designed on Freelancer, which I actually own, and consider an excellent game, because I picked it up years after it was released, randomly, at some bargin bin, published for reasons unknown by Ubisoft, I think, possible Infogrames, who cares?

I dodged all the hype however, and that’s the important bit, without the hype, the promises and all that insanity, Freelancer’s a pretty good game, definitely a classic, but nothing else.

The storyline was a decent little space opera, nothing spectacular, and it was fun exploring all the cool little corners of the game.

So, what did Roberts do in between? He produced movies, as a producer. Good movies? Not really, Lord of War is pretty awesome, the rest are just ever so much meh.

But he caught the smell of the nostalgia trip we’ve seen in the last few years, ever since the success of Tim Schaefers “LET ME MAKE AN ADVENTURE GAME” campaign.

But Nostalgia is a siren song, just because nostalgia tells you something was cool, doesn’t mean it was, Command & Conquer Red Alert was cool, OpenRA isn’t that much fun to play, is it technically the same game? Yes, yes it is, the same game. Nostalgia just ain’t enough to generate a fun experience.

So, Star Citizen, 100 million US dollars, generated based on Nostalgia, with a man at the helm, who has squandered resources before, when he over-promised Freelancer.

So what is the problem with Star Citizen? Many:

1. Lack of transparency, compared to the only other meaningful point of comparison, Frontier Developments (Elite Dangerous), we know what Frontier spend their money on, who went on inside the company, the whole thing, because Frontier is a publicly traded company, and Cloud Imperium is a personal fiefdom of silence and obscurity.
2. Feature Creep, Chris Roberts recently promised the Star Citizen would contain birds.
3. Cult-like community, you know how bad League of Legends community is? Yeah, Star Citizen’s is waaay worse.
4. Sandi Gardiner.
5. General incompetence, to the point that they can’t do a live-stream properly.
6. Terms of Service fuckery, let’s change the TOS several times! That won’t backfire at all, yayz.
7. The sale of in-game assets to fund development.
8. Broken promises, a lot of broken promises.

So, join me over the next few days, as I go through each point, and mercilessly mock authority!

CHRISROBERTS