Ashes Of Creation — releasing NEVER EVER

[Norfleet]

I mean yeah, but there is way more to it, you could be passig up a great opportunity by saying no to everything

I don't say no to EVERYTHING, just the things that expect me to simply GIVE THEM MONEY.

the problem is also most people can't just say no to the "sunk cost fallacy" that easily and there is where they get em.

What sunk cost? You don't have any sunk cost until you've GIVEN THEM MONEY. Which you must NEVER DO.

[Stack of Turtles]

Blah Blah Blah

You know what the obvious red flag giveaway that stuck out immediately to me was? The part where they were expecting me to give them money. The MOMENT I see that, I immediately walk away. Period. I need to look at nothing else.

The decision matrix is VERY SIMPLE:

Does it want me to give them money?

YES: SCAM DETECTED

NO: Who cares? Not my money, not my problem.

This is the ONE QUESTION you need to evaluate and the only thing that matters. Just follow this simple one-step flowchart and you always win.

I mean yeah, but there is way more to it, you could be passig up a great opportunity by saying no to everything, the problem is also most people can't just say no to the "sunk cost fallacy" that easily and there is where they get em.

No he's right, no great opportunity will ever ask for your money

[Norfleet]

No he's right, no great opportunity will ever ask for your money

Yes, the kind of opportunities that ask for your money are the ones where you should definitely redeem.

[mercerxiv]

Yeah, and in the context of video games - I've had enough of this **** even with "released" games, giving money at this point for an early access is just nuts.

I'm totally fine chilling on something like soulframe, where access is free and if warframe of any indication the game will always be free. Or virtually any other CBT/OBT where no purchase is required to participate. I'll mess around and play the alpha/beta if they are fun to me.
But paying to be a beta tester? You got me ****** up with some inanimate object level IQ moron.

[rusty_shackleford]

Perhaps someone should address the elephant in the room that you can launch a custom EQ or WoW private server and attract tens of thousands of people trivially, but every new MMO just sinks the moment it launches

[NezahualDoomer]

I mean yeah, but there is way more to it, you could be passig up a great opportunity by saying no to everything

I don't say no to EVERYTHING, just the things that expect me to simply GIVE THEM MONEY.

the problem is also most people can't just say no to the "sunk cost fallacy" that easily and there is where they get em.

What sunk cost? You don't have any sunk cost until you've GIVEN THEM MONEY. Which you must NEVER DO.

Games like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original sin wouldn't have happened if people didn't gave their vote of confidence.

You are right, you shouldn't give your money to whomever but in some cases you do have the option and it could be a real option if you so research and you don't find anything shaddy; in the case of AOC people should have investigated before giving money and they would have seen the MLM past and that was a clear red flag.

Perhaps someone should address the elephant in the room that you can launch a custom EQ or WoW private server and attract tens of thousands of people trivially, but every new MMO just sinks the moment it launches

I have been thinking in making a video comparing why old MMO's were better and why people keep playing them compared to the slop that these days companies serve, I just haven't had the time.

[rusty_shackleford]

Games like Pillars of Eternity […] wouldn't have happened if people didn't gave their vote of confidence.

I hate people

[NezahualDoomer]

Games like Pillars of Eternity […] wouldn't have happened if people didn't gave their vote of confidence.

I hate people

You don't like POE? I think it was pretty good but I don't remember it that well, did it have woke garbage in it?

[rusty_shackleford]

Games like Pillars of Eternity […] wouldn't have happened if people didn't gave their vote of confidence.

I hate people

You don't like POE? I think it was pretty good but I don't remember it that well, did it have woke garbage in it?

It was boring nostalgia-bait.

Divinity Original Sin was pretty good tho

[Tangerine]

Games like Pillars of Eternity […] wouldn't have happened if people didn't gave their vote of confidence.

I hate people

You don't like POE? I think it was pretty good but I don't remember it that well, did it have woke garbage in it?

It had a Niggadin.

[UltraFan123]

Yeh, I once tried out the first PoE, and then gave up and un-installed after 30 minutes.

There wasn't anything truly original about the setting or the mechanics. Everything that NWN, IWD, BG, and other DnD inspired settings and games did, PoE just lazily copy-pasted.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I bought Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire based off of the neat pacific ocean/nautical theme. But then I lost interest going through the tutorial level where you are in the blue ghostly spirit realm and there was loads and loads of paragraphs of text and some woman talking. Quit and uninstalled. Maybe I'll go back to it some day.

[mercerxiv]

I tried playing POE multiple times and never could suffer more than 1 session. The game is bland and the story is not very interesting, and mechanically feels like an inferior ripoff of something like BG2 or Pf:WotR. DOS was also mediocre, sure you get some Larian corny humor and barrelmancy, but I wouldn't say it was some masterpiece that was totally worth introducing early access/Kickstarter ******** into the medium.

Bottom line no game is worth dealing with pay now get game never model, and one could argue the model's primary purpose is to separate gullible idiots from their money, a rare decent game is just an accidental side effect.

[Norfleet]

I have been thinking in making a video comparing why old MMO's were better and why people keep playing them compared to the slop that these days companies serve, I just haven't had the time.

Honestly, there's a simple, basic explanation of why old MMOs stick around while new ones don't: People keep playing because all the people they know are still playing, and all their stuff is there, and all their accumulated experience is there. To convince people to trade their existing social group, their years of accumulated progression, and all their knowledge and experience to be a lonely, broke, clueless scrub, is a hard sell. It's that simple.

If you want people to defect, you need to convince entire groups to somehow make the jump at once and probably burn their boats, while making the transition as seamless as possible, because peopel don't want to be completely clueless again. Therefore, you need to effectively offer them a character transfer.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have been thinking in making a video comparing why old MMO's were better and why people keep playing them compared to the slop that these days companies serve, I just haven't had the time.

Our RPGhq forum group got heavily into FF11 Horizon because 1. it is a legit fun gameplay experience from early on, where you have to group up and form a six man party to continue levelling past 10, and 2. it has good aesthetics and decent presentation. We spent 300+ hours on that. But once we had neared level cap and people's schedules changed, the group fell apart.

I play WoW, FF14, and GW2 mostly by myself as artbook fantasy RPGs where I have a high degree of character customization and there is new story content to go through and high fantasy places to visit.

The problem with these kickstarter MMOs is that they 1. aren't very fun to play be it alone or with a group, and 2. don't have appeal in terms of aesthetics, presentation, story, etc. So there is little reason to play them as either an MMO or as a singleplayer game.

[Finarfin]

>it is a legit fun gameplay experience from early on

[J1M]

>it is a legit fun gameplay experience from early on

It is the same kind of fun as climbing a mountain. It is difficult and it is rewarding because it is difficult.

[rusty_shackleford]

project gorgon was a kickstarter MMO everyone overlooks despite it actually being successful and fun but low popu—

Selection_029.webp

holy **** when the hell did this happen

@Kalarion GET IN HERE GET IN HERE PEOPLE ARE PLAYING PROJECT GORGON

[Norfleet]

The problem with these kickstarter MMOs is that they 1. aren't very fun to play be it alone or with a group, and 2. don't have appeal in terms of aesthetics, presentation, story, etc. So there is little reason to play them as either an MMO or as a singleplayer game.

No, the problem with kickstarter MMOs is more basic than that.

1. They were conceived as Kickstarter scams to begin with. Given that they were thus built on a foundation of lies, the odds that the lie will somehow run away and become reality is rather remote. It's like if someone ran for office as a joke candidate and somehow got elected anyway. It makes for a funny story plot, but doesn't really happen. Even when it does, the odds that this person becomes a successful leader is even more remote.

2. The playerbase they're scraping from is much more limited. You want people who are into MMOs...but somehow not already in an MMO. Either they are washouts, their tastes were too eclectic, or their tastes are unsustainable.

If they're washouts, they essentially want the same game they washed out from, but "magically better". This essentially makes them Californese refugees who destroyed their state and then escape to vote for the same ****** things that destroyed their state in the first place. If you cater to them, you're creating "WoW, but smaller and shittier". That, or see "unsustainable".

If their tastes were too eclectic, you can, at best, create a niche game catering to this one odd crowd. The game will never hit it big, and with modern production values increasingly exploding, your ability to keep the game in business is highly questionable. Still, this offers the best hope of success, if you keep your production values modest and target this specific audience precisely.

If their tastes were unsustainable, you're targeting a cursed problem the outset. Any MMO aiming for the hardcore PvP market is DOOMED, because hardcore PvP necessarily exists in an unstable equilibrium. I know this because I've killed every single Open PvP game I've ever played, and every one I haven't played has predictably followed the same trajectory. If you try to cater to this crowd, you're going to have an explosion of early interest, because the Open PvP crowd has no game catering to them and thus is always starved. Then, most of them wash out, because only one faction can win. Game is now dead, and everyone is homeless again and wants another game just like it to recapture the dream. See point 1 about "Washouts".

3. And, of course, if you opt to create a typical milquetoast MMO that vaguely resembles a previous successful MMO, you run into the problem that THOSE GAMES STILL EXIST. Everyone who wants that has already thus been captured by those games already. If you want to "kill WoW", or whatever, you run into the challenge of trying to pry the EXISTING players off of WoW. Why should those people leave WoW, abandon everything that they've achieved, and all of their social circles there, to defect to your not-WoW?

Our RPGhq forum group got heavily into FF11 Horizon because 1. it is a legit fun gameplay experience from early on, where you have to group up and form a six man party to continue levelling past 10, and 2. it has good aesthetics and decent presentation. We spent 300+ hours on that. But once we had neared level cap and people's schedules changed, the group fell apart.

In other words, y'all ragequit within a few weeks before even getting out of the extended tutorial.

[mercerxiv]

I think the big issue with most of this Kickstarter MMO slop is that it's slop. Almost universally it's the same tired drivel about "but clan PvP!", "but you can be a king (if you make enough backroom deals)", etc.. Most of them seem to make heavy emphasis on PvP and politicking aspects, which only appeal to a narrow segment of an already limited "MMO fan" group.

Personally, I actively dislike mechanics they tout as their selling points, I don't want PvP slop, I don't want a game ran by a bunch of backroom dealing egomaniacs with their suckups, I don't want to have to fight other players to just progress through the game. I'd very much rather play an MMO with a story, cool places and characters, great cooperative content like dungeons, raids, world bosses, and PvP as a fun mode you do when you feel like it for a change of pace. IMO the niche PvP occupied in WoW was perfect for my taste, FFXIV PvP I very much don't mind (it's bad in any medium+ quantity, but who cares, it's side content), GW2 has agreeable PvP in a sense that it's optional and doesn't get in the way of progressing in the game at large, etc.

I'm just so tired of endless pvpslop mmos where main features always are "player driven". Yes, I get it, sandbox is easier and cheaper to maintain once you **** it out because player drama IS the content, but **** off with that. Give me something with substance, and an actual experience, not the "make your own fun" crap.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

1. They were conceived as Kickstarter scams to begin with. Given that they were thus built on a foundation of lies, the odds that the lie will somehow run away and become reality is rather remote. It's like if someone ran for office as a joke candidate and somehow got elected anyway. It makes for a funny story plot, but doesn't really happen. Even when it does, the odds that this person becomes a successful leader is even more remote.

Shroud of the Avatar, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, Camelot Unchained, and Crowfall were most certainly not conceived as "scams". No one begins ramping up and hiring dozens to hundreds or even thousands of devs and keeping them employed over many, many years producing a game if it was going to be a scam from the start. A common problem with all of them is that these are ambitious games being made by a team that has been thrown together for the first time and has never worked with each other before. As opposed to Blizzard where the devs had first made several games together before making WoW. You can't just throw devs together and expect something to come out good on their first try.

2. The playerbase they're scraping from is much more limited. You want people who are into MMOs...but somehow not already in an MMO. Either they are washouts, their tastes were too eclectic, or their tastes are unsustainable.

You are glossing over how MMOs have severe issues that make them repulsive to zoomers and under. WoW looks severely dated, not in aesthetics but in visual fidelity with how undetailed the faces are, the abysmal facial animations, etc. FF14 has lighting issues, ergregious texture quality, and the canned animations in most cutscenes. And those two are the best looking fantasy MMOs.

The UIs and control schemes (as in how you move your character, where the camera is positioned during combat, etc) are also heavily dated compared to modern games. You press a button you hit like a wet noodle compared to other videogames where you press a button and can feel the impact.

There is the issue with the new player experience, where in WoW you start on Exile's Reach by yourself and it doesn't hook you into WoW or really teach you how to play at all, you get spat out onto BFA or the Dragon Isles doing questing by yourself where characters you haven't met before talk on and on about things you don't care about. If you somehow reach level cap, you have never made a friend. And so on. And then FF14 also has an infamous new player starting experience with the frustration and confusing that is creating an account and setting up your basic WASD movement keys. You don't unlock your first dungeon until some 20 or 30+ hours into the game. You don't unlock content that you can do with your friends until you finish the base Stormblood story and unlock Eureka, which is some 200+ hours into the game. And so on.





Every other contemporary videogame does not have these severe fundamentally crippling problems. You download Mass Effect or Warframe or Fortnite or Dark Souls or Genshin Impact, and then you go have fun.

You also have the issue of availability. The gaming audience has grown globally. It's not just people with PCs anymore. A lot of people who might be interested in your game might not have a $3,000 USD gaming rig. Your game has to have simultaneous crossplatform global release, which most of the MMOs did not. It's 2026 and WoW is still not on consoles or phones, while Warframe and FF14 are playing catchup trying to get a phone port out waaaaay too late. That's why we have been seeing current online games and upcoming MMOs like Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Where Winds Meet, Guild Wars 3, etc, developing with crossplatform in mind. The $15 monthly subscription model is also the number #1. biggest barrier to entry according to Naoki Yoshida's book about the market research that Square did. The past five years since Genshin Impact's release has caused widespread discontent on WoW and FF14 forums as people ask why they are paying $15 per month (and a $60 box expansion every other year) for a patch that comes out once every five months, when Genshin and co put out a new patch every 6 weeks and a new expansion every year for free. I have seen a lot of people stop subbing to WoW and FF14 year round and go play Genshin and so on instead.

Why should those people leave WoW, abandon everything that they've achieved, and all of their social circles there, to defect to your not-WoW?

Most people do not no life WoW anymore. The era of oldschool MMO guilds that tried to make you go to their website to fill out an application, schedule an interview, and make you treat them as your second job is long over. The norm is that people only log on when it interests them, and float between multiple different games. A lot of the guild is playing a new FF14 expac or a new game release like BG3 whenever those come out.

[Norfleet]

Shroud of the Avatar, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, Camelot Unchained, and Crowfall

Really? You're going to cite actual scams as examples of not being scams? You gotta be shittin' me. These were all obvious scams from their basic inception. Except maybe ED. They actually made that one. Whether they actually delivered on any of it, somewhat more questionable.

You are glossing over how MMOs have severe issues that make them repulsive to zoomers and under.

Honestly not as relevant as you'd think, since the dominant marketing point of all these scams is the nostalgia-bait. These scams never target kids who have no memories to be nostalgic about.

WoW looks severely dated, not in aesthetics but in visual fidelity with how undetailed the faces are, the abysmal facial animations, etc. FF14 has lighting issues, ergregious texture quality, and the canned animations in most cutscenes. And those two are the best looking fantasy MMOs.

Just proves no one really gives a **** about the graphics. Or even the game. MMOs are a chat room with an attached game.

The UIs and control schemes (as in how you move your character, where the camera is positioned during combat, etc) are also heavily dated compared to modern games. You press a button you hit like a wet noodle compared to other videogames where you press a button and can feel the impact.

Chat room with a game.

There is the issue with the new player experience, where in WoW you start on Exile's Reach by yourself and it doesn't hook you into WoW or really teach you how to play at all, you get spat out onto BFA or the Dragon Isles doing questing by yourself where characters you haven't met before talk on and on about things you don't care about. If you somehow reach level cap, you have never made a friend. And so on. And then FF14 also has an infamous new player starting experience with the frustration and confusing that is creating an account and setting up your basic WASD movement keys. You don't unlock your first dungeon until some 20 or 30+ hours into the game. You don't unlock content that you can do with your friends until you finish the base Stormblood story and unlock Eureka, which is some 200+ hours into the game. And so on.

That's the inevitability of an aging MMO, where the playerbase has long since segregated between "those who are playing the actual game" and "those who are trapped in an extended tutorial and unable to actually participate in the game".

Most people do not no life WoW anymore. The era of oldschool MMO guilds that tried to make you go to their website to fill out an application, schedule an interview, and make you treat them as your second job is long over. The norm is that people only log on when it interests them, and float between multiple different games. A lot of the guild is playing a new FF14 expac or a new game release like BG3 whenever those come out.

Yes, people these days have such ****** attention spans that they'd lose a staredown against a goldfish.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Really? You're going to cite actual scams as examples of not being scams? You gotta be shittin' me. These were all obvious scams from their basic inception. Except maybe ED. They actually made that one. Whether they actually delivered on any of it, somewhat more questionable.

When I backed Star Citizen in 2013, Chris Roberts had already poured his own money into making a demo to show off before announcing the kickstarter. The game he proposed was very simple. It would have been Freelancer, aka a game where you fly a ship around in space with arcadey controls. The selling point was a singleplayer campaign, and then if you wanted you could spool up your own private server to mess around in for a bit. Just like Freelancer. There would have been 40 star systems, but the quality he was envisioning was modest. This would have been easily achievable with the off the shelf solutions and the design requirements that had been solved years before by other games. For the scope he pitched, the game would have taken 2 years to release.

What happened is that the kickstarter blew up, and then Chris Roberts decided that since he had more money, he could now tack on more and more features. Even though people had already paid for a smaller scope product of a certain vision he had promised. The point of no return was when decided to reimagine the game with you being able to seemlessly fly from space down onto huge planets and step outside of your ship and run around with a gun. The sandbox realism and scale was ludicrous and led to all of the issues that have plagued the game since, namely that there is far, far, far too much stuff for the servers to handle, which is why the servers always begin bugging out about 30 minutes after an instance is created and crash an hour later, and are capped at 50 players each. He promised magick server meshing tech that would handle all of these problems, but after years and years of prototyping, they did not fix the game. And the quality of the planets became insane, with him having armies of artists spend a year developing ONE CITY PER YEAR. It took A FULL DECADE for the Star Citizen team to finish creating ONE STAR SYSTEM at the insane level of detail that Chris wanted and introduced the second star system of Pyro, which it looks like they are going to spend at least several more years on.

Also, the singleplayer campaign that I bought was still nowhere in sight over a decade later. So I sold my Star Citizen game package on the grey market subreddit and bought Aquaplus' (a visual novel/SRPG developer) first stab at making a 3D JRPG, Monochrome Mobius. The aesthetics were shoddy, but I overall got a full length complete campaign and had a fun time, and I am looking forward to its sequel.

[Norfleet]

When I backed Star Citizen in 2013, Chris Roberts had already poured his own money into making a demo to show off before announcing the kickstarter.

Oh, here we go. Here comes the justification loop to try to justify how you were NOT part of a scam. This is what scammers count on. It's harder to convince people that they have been fooled than to fool them in the first place. It's quite simple, really: If they had actually been honest from the beginning, they would not have tried to pull out every weasel move in the book to try to keep people from backing out. Scam Shitizen isn't a game, it's a cult. A scam.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Honestly not as relevant as you'd think, since the dominant marketing point of all these scams is the nostalgia-bait. These scams never target kids who have no memories to be nostalgic about.

Not being able to acquire newblood is exactly why this genre struggles to keep its ahead above water. You need a constant influx of newblood to replace oldtimers losing interest. It's why Everquest is borderline dead, why WoW is a shadow of its former 12 million peak self, why GW2 is dying, and so on. The ability to acquire newblood is precisely why Genshin Impact and co took off and Genshin is considered by Sony to be their no #1. most important title. It's why WuWa has five million daily active players (that alongside with the aforementioned global crossplatform availability). That's why, again, MMO devs need to get with the times and stop appealing exclusively to 30+ year old Americans who own a $3,000 gaming rig.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

That's the inevitability of an aging MMO, where the playerbase has long since segregated between "those who are playing the actual game" and "those who are trapped in an extended tutorial and unable to actually participate in the game".

A game getting older has nothing to do with changing game design. Skyrim hasn't become harder to get into because it's now 15 years old. The game design didn't change. WoW's game design did. WoW had a gameplay experience that hooked you in and kept you. The world was hard and incentivized you to work together, levelling up and accomplishing challenges felt rewarding, the world felt real due to the other players on your side and so on. That was destroyed by the new devs who thought that they knew better. "You think you do, but you don't".

FF14's problem is that it is being made by a guy who either is not thinking straight (he thinks Final Fantasy players don't want Final Fantasy games and that MMO players don't want MMOs), hates MMOs, or is being fed bad information. Could be all three at once.

[Norfleet]

Not being able to acquire newblood is exactly why this genre struggles to keep its ahead above water. You need a constant influx of newblood to replace oldtimers losing interest.

I agree with that, yes. And that's why, like I said: Every game targeting the persistent hardcore PvP market, the eternal game refugees which will thus flood every potential new MMO and try to steer it in that direction, is doomed, because those games fundamentally cannot do this for long.

The ability to acquire newblood is precisely why Genshin Impact and co took off and Genshin is considered by Sony to be their no #1. most important title. It's why WuWa has five million daily active players (that alongside with the aforementioned global crossplatform availability).

It does not hurt that they're a tool of the Chinese State Cyberwarfare program and clearly seem to be able to target the weeb market.

That's why, again, MMO devs need to get with the times and stop appealing exclusively to 30+ year old Americans who own a $3,000 gaming rig.

I agree. Funny thing is, World of Warcrap's success can be explained by its ability to run on ****** office machines. All those newfangled MMOs trying to push the most ridiculous YE GRAPHICS instead of being able to run on potato are immediately locking themselves out of this audience pool.

That's the inevitability of an aging MMO, where the playerbase has long since segregated between "those who are playing the actual game" and "those who are trapped in an extended tutorial and unable to actually participate in the game".

A game getting older has nothing to do with changing game design. Skyrim hasn't become harder to get into because it's now 15 years old. The game design didn't change. WoW's game design did. WoW had a gameplay experience that hooked you in and kept you. The world was hard and incentivized you to work together, levelling up and accomplishing challenges felt rewarding, the world felt real due to the other players on your side and so on. That was destroyed by the new devs who thought that they knew better. "You think you do, but you don't".

"Changing Game Design" is an inevitability of an MMO. The game design necessarily targets what is their current demographic. When the game is new, the game design targets the new player experience. As the game ages and the playerbase becomes top-heavy as all the surviving players have finished the tutorial and are sitting at level cap, the game design continues to target their playerbase: The people now at the top. The level cap is raised. The power creeps and bounds. The new player is increasingly left behind, isolated from the bulk of the playerbase. In an attempt to get the new players into the actual GAME faster, catch-up mechanics get added, watering down the new player experience. This necessarily must happen in a level-up game.

I'd argue that the biggest thing that determines the long-term trajectory of an MMO is whether or not new players can meaningfully play a role in top-level gameplay. At least Eve figured this one out in that new players can function effectively as cannon fodder in high-level warfare.

[NotAI]

IMO, Where Winds Meet is pretty good. Not really an MMO but easily beats western AAA.

[Norfleet]

IMO, Where Winds Meet is pretty good. Not really an MMO but easily beats western AAA.

That's a very low bar, considering western AAA is godawful dogshit with the most effective DRM known to man: Being too garbage to even be worth pirating.

[Ranselknulf]

Really? You're going to cite actual scams as examples of not being scams? You gotta be shittin' me. These were all obvious scams from their basic inception. Except maybe ED. They actually made that one. Whether they actually delivered on any of it, somewhat more questionable.

When I backed Star Citizen in 2013, Chris Roberts had already poured his own money into making a demo to show off before announcing the kickstarter. The game he proposed was very simple. It would have been Freelancer, aka a game where you fly a ship around in space with arcadey controls. The selling point was a singleplayer campaign, and then if you wanted you could spool up your own private server to mess around in for a bit. Just like Freelancer. There would have been 40 star systems, but the quality he was envisioning was modest. This would have been easily achievable with the off the shelf solutions and the design requirements that had been solved years before by other games. For the scope he pitched, the game would have taken 2 years to release.

What happened is that the kickstarter blew up, and then Chris Roberts decided that since he had more money, he could now tack on more and more features. Even though people had already paid for a smaller scope product of a certain vision he had promised. The point of no return was when decided to reimagine the game with you being able to seemlessly fly from space down onto huge planets and step outside of your ship and run around with a gun. The sandbox realism and scale was ludicrous and led to all of the issues that have plagued the game since, namely that there is far, far, far too much stuff for the servers to handle, which is why the servers always begin bugging out about 30 minutes after an instance is created and crash an hour later, and are capped at 50 players each. He promised magick server meshing tech that would handle all of these problems, but after years and years of prototyping, they did not fix the game. And the quality of the planets became insane, with him having armies of artists spend a year developing ONE CITY PER YEAR. It took A FULL DECADE for the Star Citizen team to finish creating ONE STAR SYSTEM at the insane level of detail that Chris wanted and introduced the second star system of Pyro, which it looks like they are going to spend at least several more years on.

Also, the singleplayer campaign that I bought was still nowhere in sight over a decade later. So I sold my Star Citizen game package on the grey market subreddit and bought Aquaplus' (a visual novel/SRPG developer) first stab at making a 3D JRPG, Monochrome Mobius. The aesthetics were shoddy, but I overall got a full length complete campaign and had a fun time, and I am looking forward to its sequel.

I haven't followed the drama as closely as some, but this rings true in my ears. I vaguely remember about 7 or 8 years ago the Chris Roberts got frustrated by some posts and started offering refunds to the original kickstarter backers.

Not sure how that turned out, but I think at this point he has so much cash that he would gladly give refunds, for whatever its worth.

I did test out the game a few weeks ago, I figured why the hell not, there isn't anything else out there right now. The game is still buggy as ****, but I do see promise. I wouldn't advise spending money on the game, but this is the rpghq so I'm not really worried about you all opening your wallets to anything. The game just needs another 5 years and then maybe it can move into beta testing and early access.