slow down lightest light slice pull up pull up pull up pull up dude
pull up we're gonna die this is the end this is your intentional
one
star citizen the massively multiplayer space sim game
from industry legend chris roberts that launched as a crowdfunding campaign way
back in 2012. nearly nine years and 350
million dollars later star citizen still has not been released
sure there's a playable alpha that now has over a hundred beautifully detailed
ships a solar system with massive fully explorable planets and moons and sci-fi
cities with top-tier public transit whoa
but it's still an alpha largely
unpolished where you're just as likely to successfully land on a planet as you
are to clip right through it and predicting when or if the full game will
ever launch is impossible because cloud imperium games the company developing
star citizen seems to have announced and missed more release dates than techlink
has had cringy intros which is not much of an accomplishment because all of our
intros are good they're all they're all pretty good but here's the thing i've
discovered about star citizen after months of research the question of when
the game will release might be the least interesting one you
could ask because as hilariously disappointing as it is that cig thought
they could have the game out by november 2014
if things keep on rolling like they have been recently when star citizen actually
does come out it might be
the best game ever
even when we get a full release we're gonna keep improving things keep adding
things it's all been built on such a foundation of lies that why would i why
would i believe the new road map or whatever right you know what i mean
welcome to a new series on TechLinked we're calling tech longer where we take
a deep dive into the tech and gaming stories that get us thinking and loving
and hating because if you've heard of star citizen before you're probably one
of three types of people you're either one a star citizen hater someone who not
only thinks the game is going to fail but that it deserves to fail if there's
any justice in this cruel cruel world
you might be a star citizen lover like yeah cig has made mistakes but if they
succeed well we got the best game ever on our hands and surely that's worth a
few thousand dollars and potentially decades of patience
or three you might be like me someone who remembers star citizen as oh that
was a kickstarter that sold video game ships for hundreds of dollars right
did that ever come out i heard it was a scam
are you buying a ship come on no come on don't buy a ship come on now if you're
none of those three things that's fine i'm not trying to put you in a box
i only ask that you don't try to put this game in a box either you see the
one thing that the haters and super fans can agree on is that there is no other
game like star citizen and that's true not only because of its uniquely
convoluted and controversial history but also because of the sheer scale of its
ambition chris robert's vision for star citizen was initially to build the best
damn space sim ever but as he told gamers nexus back in 2016 as fans
continued to back the project and cig grew robert's vision
expanded instead of using existing tech cig would build new fundamental systems
from scratch planets ships and other objects would be made of components that
interact with each other and the game world in a physically consistent way
creating a super high fidelity simulation of reality itself star
citizen wouldn't just be the best space sim
it would be the best everything sim okay chris
you're telling me you're trying to build a matrix
yes i asked cig's director of community
tyler witkin to define this game as cig sees it the official answer i got back
was star citizen is the most ambitious
immersive uncompromising universe sim ever it is our attempt at a living
universe that will ultimately become the metaverse for tens if not hundreds of
millions of people around the world we want people to be able to escape into
the verse and never have to come out except for the essentials smiley face
emoji okay uh so two things people are going
to find a way to go to the bathroom without leaving their gaming chair and i'm not sure that's healthy uh two a
universe simulator certainly does sound ambitious
it also sounds awesome at this point i had no choice to even attempt to grasp
the scale of this project i had to dive head first into the waters of the buggy
alpha and experience it for myself i had
to get my star citizenship
or at least a travel visa cig regularly holds what they call free fly events
where star foreigners get to try out a few ships in the game world which is
known as the persistent universe so i made an account installed the game
created my character and entered the matrix
over the course of the next hour i left my character's apartment found a train
to the spaceport found out the space board hadn't rendered in properly
restarted the game made it to the spaceport passed through a security
checkpoint that will in the future send you to prison for carrying contraband
spawned my fighter almost crashed into some buildings then left the planet's
atmosphere shot down some pirates attacking a space yacht boarded the
space yacht and got one shotted by an npc however
i wasn't even mad enough to blame it on the lag because the scale and complexity
on display here really hit me the city that i had just left had felt
massive but it was only one tiny section of an entire planet about half the size
of earth's real-life moon and i hadn't even jumped to one of the three other
planets in the alpha or their multiple moons and dozens of space stations
throughout the system all fully explorable on foot but wait a second
there's another space game with massive scale and realistic immersive gameplay
elite dangerous made by frontier it's like the dark mirror image of star
citizen it also had a kickstarter campaign in 2012 with a full release in
2014 the same year star citizen was
supposed to launch oh and it also contains a one-to-one scale simulation
of the entire milky way galaxy based on real scientific principles and data
that's 400 billion star systems star citizen has over 120 planned star
systems but the alpha currently has
one frontier accomplished this by using the
opposite strategy as cig release a playable somewhat polished space flight
sim with pretty basic procedurally generated planets and then add planetary
landings rovers and more complex gameplay frontier's latest expansion
odyssey finally lets players head out on foot outside of a ship or rover
but wait a second that erases one of the main advantages
that star citizen had overly dangerous
sort of remember cig isn't trying to create a fun space sim they're building
the matrix ships and star citizen are built from the ground up with functional
interiors complete with ship component access panels cargo bays air locks
elevators turret gunner seats and control stations if your ship has the
space you can personally place cargo weapons land vehicles even other
spaceships inside it and have a judo fight in the med bay about who gets to
keep it all sure elite dangerous may be a fully released game but even in
odyssey there aren't true ship interiors at all to board your ship you walk onto
a blue marker pass out and wake up in
the pilot seat what that's like yeah i know
now according to cig the reason all that stuff is possible in star citizen and a
big reason development is taking so long is because of all the proprietary
technology they've built from scratch the game's built on a version of
cryengine but it's been modified so heavily if it was a person it would be
nebula from the marvel movies
chris roberts thought he could accomplish a very narrow goal but once
the stretch goals were met they very quickly realized that the stuff that
they wanted to do actually required technology that didn't exist and would
require incredible time and investment to get done there's some really good
coverage from gamer's nexus and digital foundry that gets super technical on
this but here's just some of the custom tech cig told me that they're working on
moving from a 32-bit to 64-bit coordinate system to allow solar system
level scale combined with micro details at ground level planet building that
combines procedural generation with manual artistry and custom
particle-based weather dynamic persistence so any changes to the world
will persist between game sessions meaning you could hide a gun under a
rock quantum jump to another planet log out and the gun would still be there if
you came back to get it later they even built a face over ip system that lets
you use a webcam to control your player's facial expressions did i tell
you to get up and an entirely new first-person shooter system which was
definitely necessary even though cryengine was built specifically for FPS
games you need that
and that's like maybe a quarter of the custom features that cig even told me
about the way they tell it all of this work is necessary to create the ultimate
best damn space metaverse thing ever
but why are they even trying to do that and more importantly why are they doing
it this way selling thousand dollar virtual ships to fly in an alpha that
will crash if you look at it the wrong way instead of shipping something basic
but polished and adding to it later everyone i asked this question had
slightly different answers but to me it seems like it all comes back to chris
roberts i didn't want to focus on roberts in this video and i still don't but i can't
avoid bringing him up now because so much of what makes star citizen
whatever star citizen is comes from him but there's already been
so much published about the man he's the visionary behind wing commander star
lancer and freelancer he's the game studio executive running the most
crowd-funded project of all time he's the filmmaker who produced a few okay
movies with money from an investment fund that exploited a german tax
loophole before the government closed it in 2006.
roberts may not be a hollywood prodigy
but he is a visionary he can make you
believe in his ambitious ideas and he'll fight to see them through a skill that
helped him lead developers to create new game engines for multiple titles in
order to make the experience roberts wanted and the subject of his vision has
for most of his career centered around a single type of game space-based flight
combat sims he made a bunch and they were all pretty great clearly crafted by
a man who loves the idea of pilots crossing the galaxy fighting alien
empires and hauling cargo but robert's vision was
limited by two things the graphics power of hardware in the 90s and studio
investors making unreasonable demands like stick to a budget and release the
game at some point unbelievable well graphics technology
advanced and crowdfunding got popular enabling roberts to leave the film
industry and raise over 6 million dollars from the initial kickstarter
campaign for star citizen and its single player story mode squadron 42 but turns
out to everyone's surprise good vibes alone won't build a universe simulator
star citizen missed virtually every launch date cig set while the studio
continued to crowdfund designing and selling new virtual ships for tens and
hundreds and thousands of dollars meanwhile it was expanding hiring
hundreds of developers opening new studios and paying a-list celebrities to
do full motion capture for the squadron 42 campaign cig did release the pvp
arena commander and star marine modules as well as slowly build out the pu alpha
over the next few years backers were finally getting a little taste of the
game they had supported but it was all happening at a snail's pace compared to
the original timeline cig had set and as it tends to do cynicism started to set
in around 2015 when gaming sites like kotaku polygon and the escapist wrote
hit pieces roberts weathered attacks over his dictatorial leadership style
his inefficient use of funds and even nepotism concerning his wife's position
as vp is marketing from a growing faction of heretics who didn't just want
their money refunded they wanted star citizen to fall
like the vanduul seek the destruction of the empire
the the ali they're the aliens in the game it's bad guys see some of robert's
greatest successes in game development had come from projects where he pushed
gaming technology forward now gaming pcs
had the horsepower to enable a realistic high fidelity space sim so with a
massive vision and no external pressures from parent companies or publishers why
wouldn't you shoot for the moon pun intended even if it takes you a
little longer one star skeptic i talked to a youtuber who goes by binky atx aka
bucha says that in 2015 he pulled the
more than ten thousand dollars that he had invested in the game he'd had
relationships with roberts and cig staff in the early days and he didn't like the
direction things were heading in his mind in the minds of many others star
citizen was becoming less of a game in development and more of a money raising
machine perpetuated by faith in chris roberts and a fan base that didn't want
to give up on something into which they had already poured so much time and
money sunk cost fallacy more like sun
cost galaxy
that's the title of the youtube series butcha made about star citizen i used it
here for a cheap laugh i'm sorry now to their credit cig has released company
financials which show that in 2017 annual income dropped for the first time
but in 2018 the launch of alpha version 3.0 brought a ton of new features and
secured more backer support cig also sold a 10 stake in the company to
billionaire clive calder for 46 million
keeping the development car running and despite the scathing assaults on star
citizen over the past few years a sizable portion of the fandom held on
and actually grew that is one of the most
confusing aspects about this whole thing especially to me someone who doesn't
play mmos and has never backed a crowdfunding project in my life cig
missed deadline after deadline but even
among those critical of the game i detected at times a faint sense of hope
that despite its drawn-out over-complicated development star
citizen will be released star citizen is
exceedingly unique it was built to be unique we have never seen anything like
this before i've perhaps describing the inhabitants of
star citizen's world as either lovers or haters is too simplistic if my twitter
poll is any indication there may be a good amount of people who either think
that cig sucks but the game is good or
that cig is okay but the game sucks though some people also apparently
thought the game is great and at times cig can be bad at times it wasn't a very
good poll but for some the whole thing isn't that
complicated many have held on to their hope since day one that this game would
be the best thing to happen since the discovery of fire which is kind of wild
because fire was pretty sick i think this could be the greatest video game
ever made not necessarily the most fun but in terms of greatness yeah like how
expansive it is how many systems there are how deep it goes how rich it is all
that kind of stuff it might just by incredible amounts trump everything
that came before it to understand this hopeful perspective i talked to
morphologists a youtuber who covers star citizen and some other space sim games
play with friends because there there's so many it's kind of a sandbox in some
ways where you can create so many scenarios independently that cig just
isn't giving you yet it can make it really really fun like any mmo the true
value of star citizen is in its community i'd seen videos of players
manning turrets with their friends to defend their larger ship against
multiple fighters i'd seen the damar rally an entirely player-driven
multi-stage day-long race over a planetoid where drivers have to navigate
desert terrain while avoiding ambush by rogue ships and i'd watched bed banana's
amazing video where he hatches a daring prison escape by hijacking a rover and
being dramatically saved by his friend under heavy fire
i needed the group experience so luke Linus and i hopped aboard morphs
multi-crew ship and prepared to have our eyes opened i have a cyclone and
glitched in a chair oh my god i am glitched into the ship
right now we're about to die yeah why
because i got caught in the doors oh my god i'm glitched in this chair
again how do i go fast i can't kill him my
eyes were opened alright to the fact that this game truly is an alpha after
trying to meet up in-game for more than an hour a feat that was made even more
difficult by Linus repeatedly killing himself for giggles i made the mistake
of logging out in the bed of my ship that apparently triggers a bug that
prevents you from logging back in until you've reset your character which involves making a request to cig and
then waiting at least 15 minutes two hours into the stream i was able to join
the squad let's go do some star wars baby why are
you setting your icu i got to fly this puppy
here i go no don't jump off
backspace or killing oh i think someone else hit the button as much are you
messing with the buttons
Linux we gotta let riley record something more
than running around a space station wait wait wait wait we need to get the
ship wow that's way too much work and you killed yourself
you're happy i'm having much fun have fun grab me your 310 dollars
on second thought bringing Linus along was a mistake i thought he would have
some interest in earnestly checking out the game since he and luke actually had
started a Linus tech tips organization in star citizen and had promised to
pledge one dollar per member which was
3061 at the time of writing
but Linus he's more troll now than man
but despite Linus's best efforts we got to experience some epic moments that
could only happen at this level of immersion in star citizen driving a
rover into the cargo bay of morph ships and taking an elevator up to the bridge
leaving a space station to discover we were being attacked by an interest-class
frigate with other players in the server coming to our aid being forced to shoot
Linus when he got a hold of a gun having impressed charges against me for his
murder thus giving me criminal status and then dying and waking up in prison
just like how that happens in real life
oh my gosh while i was doing time and
the slammer i got to thinking about everything i had learned about star
citizen and what a video game even is star citizen it is game development as a
service this software is in very early
alpha but the product itself is a full release
it's not so much about the game as it is about being a part of something great
for hardcore star citizen fans the game isn't the literal software you run on
your pc it's the meta game of being involved in development because star
citizen isn't technically released the game's true fans think of themselves as
being a part of the development process not consumers of a product there are
youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers who make weekly
update videos about nerfs buffs game mechanics and features who talk
excitedly about underlying server technology for their part cig makes a
lot of this information available through super in-depth developer interviews on their own youtube channel
and there's a progress tracker charting what's being worked on at any one time
as long as they continue with that transparency the true believers could
keep on believing indefinitely but
will the rest of us should we believe this game will come
out because that's really what it comes down to at this point
belief i mean squadron 42's latest window to release the beta was q3 2020
and when that came in went chris roberts released a statement saying the game
will be done when it's done and will not be released by a certain date just to
make you happy james james isn't here
andy now this attitude can be seen as an
uncompromising commitment to one's vision and it is that but it can also be
seen as disdain for deadlines and honestly a sort of disrespect for the
people who backed this project thinking they would have something more than an
alpha nine years in cig still needs after eight nearly nine
years of development it still needs its
backers is that right and it brings up the question how long can a crowdfunded
project ride on its backers goodwill we don't know we're seeing that
experiment play out right here in real time star citizen is still raising funds
2020 was their highest funded year somehow in early 2021 they passed 350
million dollars in funding now a cynical person would see that and say look
they just want the money but a hopeful person sees that as dedicated fans
with a lot of expendable income continuing to support a project that
they really believe in and the thing is no one can really say
whether their faith is misplaced cig has developed some groundbreaking technology
so who's to say that they couldn't continue doing that
the only people who could say are the people making the game but what
about the people who have been burned along the way their current monetization
is incredibly predatory that to me immediately sets off alarm bells when
you can buy 25 000 packages that you can
only see if you've already spent a thousand dollars that to me immediately
screams these people are not on the level some people call star citizen a
scam and i don't think that's accurate even butcher said it's not a scam but
the fact is people have been scammed by it
the way that star citizen was originally presented was not as a perpetual alpha
project with a far off release date more than a decade away
if there's one thing that i do blame robertson cig for it's giving the
impression in the past that the full game was going to be released in the
next couple years it's always the next couple years
although now people are talking about five to ten years it just what's going
on i mean hey i get it i started working
on this video at the start of february the way that star citizen is presented
now makes it pretty clear that it's a game in active development and there is
a 30-day refund window so i don't think many people who choose to buy a game
package today are being misled into thinking they'll definitely get to be
mark hamill's wingman next year by christmas mark hamill
he'll be your friend he'll be your buddy yeah dude you can be friends with you
could fly with mark hamill wow although
lest you do think that being attacked by frigates is a super common occurrence
the interest that they spawned when you were on stream has no interior yeah no
they they spawn they spawn that in for you when we were on a stream the idris
and then there's the fact that this week cig released a video called what is star
citizen that definitely makes the game look more polished than it is and and
hey you know yeah that's exactly what i'm talking about cig that's the
stop that now if you the viewer are thinking about buying into star citizen
first off maybe just wait until the first free fly event because they have
them pretty regularly but if you know what you're getting into and you know
that it's quite possible this janky alpha experience might be all you ever
get out of this project 45 bucks for a starter ship
isn't a horrible price for a pretty cool early access game that could turn into
something amazing but could also
not at the end of the day for a backer every
crowdfunding project is built on hope
if it wasn't people would wait until the game is finished and released and
critics give it a score out of 10 and the customer decides to buy the game for
a reasonable price star citizen is not that it might be the
longest con in the history of the gaming industry or
it might be the greatest game ever
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techlinked guys this was a crazy video to make whose idea was this
but it was super fun and i learned a lot so big thanks to all the people who i
talked to and were able to give me a big window into this crazy crazy world if
you want to see more tech longers like this on this channel leave a comment below and if you thought it was dumb and
you never want to see anything like this ever again also leave a comment i love
you and all of your thoughts