CIG "Would you like to playtest this game?" Player "Hey, this game keeps crashing" CIG "So what you're saying is that you want to buy more ships?" Player "No! I want the game to work so i can play test it" Cig "Yes..... We hear you and we understand. We'll add more ships to buy"
Ofc not that easy and a low IQ vibe. Truth is CIG doesn't have their inhouse core tech inplemented yet, and ofc CR want to make something special. If he only listened to fans we would have had something similar to Starfield with loadingscreens etc, which imho is sooooo old news. I support CR and CIG in their endevours.
I think CIG's big problem is that CR is kinda ideologically opposed to the most important goal of playtesting, which is assessing if something is actually fun. But realistically it's just a matter of them not really acting on it. It makes it to our hands and we report back and unless the answer ends up being "cut it" or "nerf it" nothing really happens.
This hit me the hardest during the Starfield presentations. "We do it this way because it is more fun for the player"... something I have never heard from CR. He just want's to make simple things more detailed and complex, to a point where it has never been done before in the industry (with good reason), and then he is proud to be a pioneer like 30 years ago with strike fighter. But guess what, making the CEO remember his childhood in a good way is not the goal of the project.
Dude, we had 4 flight model changes that would like to argue with that conclusion. Devs have proclaimed that they also think 2.6 flight model was the best one yet, but it didn't play well with bigger ships, atmospheric flight, game performance and balancing. Hence why they're still working on a new flight model that's heavily inspired by the 2.6 one, but plays better with what we have in SC. Nobody knows how long it'll take them to implement the new flight model, or if it actually will be fun, but it is an indication that CIG does care about "fun" - it's just that implementing changes is ridiculously slow with them (probably because most of the engineers are tied up with working on either SQ42 or Server Meshing, so there's no-one to actually put the work in)
What a great video and so true. I found just watching people play Star Citizen on Twitch drives me crazy. It's one thing to play it with all the bugs, but to watch someone go though it is mind-numbingly bad for my health. lol I just can't do it...
The difference with SC is that Chris Roberts has his vision, and when players tell him his vision isn't fun, CR just thinks the players are wrong. That's why change from user feedback is so slow.
I just stopped playing all together. Only so much tedium, janky and boring cookie cutter missions with no progression you can deal with. At best it's a checkout each patch and walk away.
Star Citizen's main component that it's missing is Direction not management but actual Direction they have absolutely no idea what their own goal is they're just throwing a bunch of sci-fi features in a video game environment
What drives me nuts is stuff like the Starmap. It was released in 2015? 2016? and they knew instantly it was buggy and a mess. They could have come in and implemented a few patches to clean it up. It doesn't need to be play tested, a blind monkey could tell it was bugged. Did it get fixed? no, instead they ignored it and didn't mention it (as far as I know) until 2020 when they announced they were working on building blocks and a Starmap rework. Well, almost FOUR years later..and still not a freaking sign of it. Did it need a rework? yes. Could it have been "good enough" for 8 years with a few bug fixes and some small QOL features? yes absolutely. CIG in my opinion is a complete joke when it comes to stuff like this. Its literally one of the first features touched by a new player coming into the game, you use it literally EVER time you play..and it couldn't have gotten a bug pass 6 years ago? clowns, all of them.
Hope CIG watches this while hitting the squadron 42 release red button lol Found the comment on them adding systems to squadron 42 that will be added to the PU without play testing is a big concern and an incite full point! Let’s see how it goes fingers crossed.
The problem is that the feedback is being presented by the hard core players, not the average gamer. I complained that it took me 30 minutes to get to my ship and anywhere after logging in, I complained about the long hyperloop delays where I'm just sitting there, and I was criticized by hard core players and told that the game was not for me, and that I should find a new game. CIG is hearing the most from the Hard core players but is not hearing from the average gamers who duck in, play a little and then stays away because playing was too painful.
The transit system is something I've been complaining about two, mainly because of how buggy it is for people like the transit not spawning for one player but not the other which traps them at the apartments. a solution would be to just invent other ways to leave a city like what new babbage does, but even with new babbage you have to take the transit system out first, and then you can just exit the city on foot. just add a garage terminal to the apartments so we can either spawn a ground vehicle or just walk out and let a friend pick us up. but nope, gotta get on the train may never show up.
@@DarkSpyro707 I'm thinking taking the train is cool the first 5 times you do it, but when you get to your 50th time everyone is going to be very annoyed with it. Why CIG thinks this is fun is a mystery to me.
Gotta agree with Mike about just putting in the features and letting people test those features. Every time CIG adds something the community loses its mind, so it's true we don't properly get to play test a lot of features.
CIG looks to approach this in a similar manor where we will now have Arena commander to really test things a lot closer, which you could call the new testbed for majority of existing players, and new players coming in. My judgement will come when 4.0 is here and polished to the degree where it hits a beta state. When we get there it will be far and beyond Starfield and any other scifi game out there.
Absolutely 22:20 agree with you. As a Star Citizen supporter/player yes we are testing as we play. We are finding all kinds of serious problems eg: missing engine parts on pledged or game bought ships even after repair making ship completely useless. Not only are we finding these issues but cig is hoping we find some BS work around (after we have to record, screenshot and recreate) to get around the problem and them not actually fix it. If we find a workaround they scratch it off the list. It seems like their main goal is just to keep us busy flying all over the place or having to go through the whole planet side sequence to draw out say cashing in your salvage mission, just put TDD's on Stations which would take some repetition out of it. At least like mining for example they let you refine and wait or take a lesser pay out on the space station. Srry for long post, never even got into weapons, armor and modules or star map.
Playtesting is for when you're trying to make an actual game. I dont really think anyone playing SC thinks CIG is trying to make a game at this point, and for a long time prior.
Its rare we agree, but one thing you said has been a mantra of mine since backing this game and beginning testing in 2-3.0. People HAVE to deal with the bugs if we are ever going to progress. Every moment we spend bandaiding something to make it more pleasurable to the alpha testers is days worth of code that has to be iterated repeatedly. 30k protection, revamping the timers, even people complaining about the Ion and the Defender's old lasers. These things were felt out by the devs, iterative, and NEW.... yet the players claimed they should be removed of ceased until full release. ALL of those have created more software to develop codes to change, and bandaids that have to be iterated, every, single, patch, individually, until the players see the intention of the feature. Ship death being impactful, player death, long term punishment for criminals and pirates, along with combat changes. Look at the "armor" fiasco. That was talked about for YEARS and had to be backpedaled and recoded because of people complaining. Sure it doesn't make sense now, but there WILL be features in place to rectify the pain. SC is an ALPHA, sure, its playable, but they have never once said it was meant to simulate a partially full game experience. Its simply playing what we have as a demo as things are released. Its not meant to be painless, its not meant to be iterative. Its meant to be "something" to give the players a taste of what is to come. Some of that is painful now, and even moreso in the future. Newer backers just don't look back at the data/promises CIG has made in the last 10 years (and I don't blame them, its not worth it) and have no idea what game this is meant to be or what 90% of the features will genuinely be. Even backers who follow religiously have many unknowns.... TLDR. I agree that players just need to ride out the pain of the alpha in order to progress the game at any rate.
I said it and I will say it again. Games are software. Valves methodology is effectively TDD (test driven development) which states : First, Define the goals (make a space game that is fun), Then do the bare minimum to achieve the goal, Then, you test that part and see if it works as expected. If it does, rework the code if required (Minimal code may not be the best code) as you have tests to validate it now, anyway, Then, increase the scope/increase the goal to add a new feature, Rince and repeat. It's kind of a simplified version of it, but it sums it up. Star Citizen is NOT play testing, because to do play testing you need to take actions to resolve the issues BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ELSE. I cannot stress how important it is for games to understand this and educate themselves on the more mature Software engineering world.
If that's the approach of most game developers where they are taking the easiest way to the finish line, is imho the biggest problem with the industry. CIG is doing it differently due to a LIVE service, but CIG is also innovating where this aspect is hughly missing in the industry. It's like things are being created and thrown out to see what sticks on the wall. Little quality and a lot of shit which we can plainly see.
The only thing we're testing is stability imho. Server performance, and how the performance is affected by users playing with these small puzzle pieces.
This is a very interesting video. It most definitely will change how I provide feedback. Less proposed changes and more impressions. Thank you for showcasing this 😊
The problem is that what Valve is doing and what we're doing with SC are different. They playtest ad a part of the development and design process, and we quality assurance test in the alpha before the release of the game to beta and full release.
@@t1kosuave ya, the more I thought about this topic after I wrote this the more I saw the dynamic how you described it. It's definitely a weird mixture of design philosophy and how we (the backers) fit into the process.
I remember the top people at CIG talking about "minimum viable product". It really seems this is their goal. They'll implement it, move on, and fix it much later. We need at least some kind of iteration on things.
Problem with bringing stuff over from SQ42 is that, except for everything around combat, it won't bring much to SC. I don't think you have cargo hauling in SQ or a need for Quanta, etc. Lots of the problems with SC will have to be solved inside of SC. Best thing is tech polishing, that they can be sure that the client side runs smooth. That is the best thing + combat that SQ will bring to SC. Aurora starting idea...yah I can see how that will backfire because all the whales complain about not haveing their uber ship from the start. Else, yes for actual testing things, that is a very good idea. The "art dosn't need to be finished" reminds me of what I said years ago. Why did CIG not just make a few "prove of concept" ships that are final and the rest just has the basics covered. Focus your money and time on the game, not the graphics. What do we have now? Nice graphics, no gameplay.
This is honestly a bigger endictment on the whole of the gaming industry right now. Playtesting is done by day 1 preorders. They dont make drastic sweeping mechanical or structural changes to adapt to feedback because they simply cant. And the idea of being so dynamic and adaptable to the playtest feedback would never happen in a modern game studio because most of those features and mechanics have taken many many months if not multiple years to develop as poorly as they have done. Games take half a decade to make as opposed to 18 months or less. They are about the same size and scale still. Theres more openworld games now as a game format, But the open world is usually an entire team set to make and focus on that. The mechanics, the actual gameplay, just sucks. Just Cause 4 I think is a good example of this. Those mechanics and systems on paper sound great if you know what the series is, But in practice they absolutely suck. And its as if they only ever took feedback from players from Just Cause 3 in order to finish Just Cause 4 without actually testing if those implemented feedback changes actually played well. The thing about the God of War characters spoiling puzzles before you even get to them seems to show that the way games are being developed is fundamentally incorrect if their goal is to make a good, fun game.
The problem with SC right now is that the game is really just a collection of proof of concept mechanics. There's nothing to tie elements together well and there is no cause and effect stuff going on.
I think we do know the time line. Valve barely releases games anymore. They're great when they do. But it's better to have a few misses every once in a while than a banger every 10 years
Thing is Vavle dosn't need to release games. Steam is their main income. They can take whatever time they need or want to do another game. From my point of view, I would even debate IF they are even a game developer anymore and are more like a publisher that releases a game every once in a while.
@@larslaufer301hey still develop games all the time, they just never release most of the games they develop nowadays. Most of them gets scrapped. There's been many credible asset leaks of many many games valve has scrapped over the years, as well as leaks coming from the mouths of former valve devs themselves. From what we know, valve has a problem with wanting to always release games that would be big game changers in the industry that would earn them billions. So smaller games tend to be scrapped. I heard they were once developing a time travel fishing VR game as well as a voxel based game similar to Minecraft, but those were completely scrapped. (Fun fact: that voxel tech is now being reused for the smoke grenade mechanics in counter strike 2)
It is more fun making new stuff than it is fixing old stuff. This is why it takes so long to go back and revisit when you are constantly making new ships and other stuff. The idea of polishing a game is "no new stuff for now" and "focus on making it easier with less bugs" and "focus on making it fun". Not sure CIG knows how to do this. This is why they suffer from scope creep.
And he pays you a small wage while you help him realize your dream as his, and it becomes one of the biggest game series in history. Yeah, that is kind of weird!
Half-Life Alyx is a completely incredible experience. It's an incredible looking game and all of the mechanics are intuitive and fun. Plus the story is pretty mind blowing if you care about Half Life lore. I still personally like Boneworks a bit better but that's a whole different thing.
The thing about Star Citizen is that it isn't actually a game in the way Valve has made games. Traditionally, games have win/loss conditions, specific goals and/or stories to work through. SC is a sandbox universe simulator. There is no 'right way' to play it, and no two players have the same experience. For just one example: there are people who want it to be a straight PvP combat game, and there are other people who want to never encounter PvP at all. Ask ten people what their goal is in playing SC, and you will get eleven different answers. The intention is for everyone to craft their own journey, a life in the 'Verse. That has been what Chris has said since day one, and why having a solid vision at the helm of the project has been critical for creating an appealing environment for us to play in. Now S42 on the other hand: They had better be playtesting the crap out of those missions...
2:15 What valuable bug-related data is exposed with the implementation of 24hr+ prison sentences and ridiculously low merit rewards for prison gameplay?
Agree with every point Mike made here. We need focused playtesting on core game loops. If they release SQ42 without some play testing it's guaranteed to be worse than it could be. Also, I get so annoyed that all these solo players are buying and using the biggest ships in the game. Its ridiculous to see a solo person flying around in a carrack or even a C2. Make smaller ships for solo play and big ships for group play.
Here is my view I like doing everything in a game. This is contrary to good game design. I will explain what this means in SC, Challenge is key and if you are not challenged or being pushed to your limits you get bored. Currently I feel that too much of the game is simply to easy and would like all mechanics gain a lot more difficulty. Mining is a step in the right direction and is implemented pretty well. FPS mining can be done by absolutely any one and is very low risk to the player, now here is where it starts to fall away. Roc mining I feel is pretty good in difficulty and is a pretty good step up from hand mining but after this i.e. ship mining just adds modules to the Roc mining experience and I do not feel that is enough. I would like to see the "RISK" for ship mining to increase a lot more and the difficulty of rocks to be increased. FPS mining to Roc mining is a nice evolution but from Roc to ship the only real difference is the amount of recourses collected and making it easier with modules. (This should not be the case and it should feel like it is significantly more difficult in a ship than in a Roc not easier). Module should be a preference not a proration, the current implementation is simply to make it easier. I would like to see module implementation where by you can not apply them unilaterally. I will explain. If you want a larger green zone you cant use a burst module and you receive a penalty and a bonus. It needs to feel like when you go mine an object like gold that the head and modules are designed for that purpose and that purpose alone. (You are a gold miner). Basically here are the equipment required for gold mining and if you don't use it your yield is significantly impacted. If you are not geared for gold mining your return on a 40% rock should be 25%or less in the resource you are mining. Now I am not a miner but do some mining from time to time and find that it is just to easy to do ship mining. It should be that Red Monster is better at mining not just because of efficiency but because he has a larger research set of his chosen profession and make his effort more valuable. I would rather see a bunch of meta in the game around the resources than have an overview design and modules should define your role in mining. When you invest in a ship it should feel like a profession i.e. prospector (I am a large scale miner) and a mole be I am a (Gold/quant/whatever) miner and if you are not geared for your task it will affect your profit margins. This does two things it allows a player to find their limit on how far they are willing to go for there investment and makes professional feel like there research and skill is rewarded. Since laser sizes are already a thing to make a gold mining or quant head should not be that difficult and it plays nicely into the engineering and attach/ detach mechanic of heads.
The problem is that what Valve is doing and what we're doing with SC are different. They playtest ad a part of the development and design process, and we quality assurance test in the alpha before the release of the game to beta and full release.
Siege of Orison is a perfect example of something that was released without being tested, or at least without sufficient testing. Let's be real, the pre alpha testers are the audience.
I mean, the players are constantly playtesting star citizen and giving feedback, the devs just aren't iterating on GAMEPLAY, they're iterating on features. They're essentially still building a toolkit for making a game, without actually making the game. And yes, they need to be internally watching first time people play, to understand how people are playing the game. Not just taking player feedback, because a lot of the time player feedback is skewed by what they're hearing from others. It still blows my mind that first time playthroughs of portal, people get scared and usually fail that fire pit puzzle at least once, even though the puzzle is literally to just place two portals and step through. People just freeze up under the "high" pressure, even though it's insanely simple. When I first bought into Star Citizen, the core of the game as described at the time, was the persistent player driven economy. Still to this day we have nothing to show of that system.
Watching and listening to players instead of the CEO... Amazing! Mike - It's not playtesting in SC if NO ONE actually watches or cares about the user feedback. They barely care about technical bugs, but definitely not about poor game design.
I think fame was good and as some point achievement will make SC more linear for new players. Old HC players will do same as always have -> grind money and kills.
SC isn't one game, it's dozens of game loops that all interfere with each other. Pvp ship combat is really fun, but it interferes with a lot of other systems.
Valve's games are made with design-by-committee. It's like they don't believe in game design. You can't just ask the market what they want and give it to them. They don't know.
It's in alpha state for a reason, where it's in plainsight... Imho I think CIG has something truly special in their hands and when the core tech finally is in, and polished no one will argue the results. I'm glad CIG have become a big company and can create something this big and truly nextgen games, where no other company can compare their reskinned games that is the same old shit in different wrapping approach. This is why the gaming industry has died due to the lack of innovation, literally.
Where do you find the info on their size? I'd like to see hard proof of how many devs they actually have and how the money was and is spent. It feels like most of the money was blown early on and CR is just so over his head insane that he drives talent away because he either has zero leadership skills or is toxic.
I dont think playtesting is happenign constantly. The playtesting valve is talking about is not what CIG is doing. Valve is having people play the game while they watch, take notes actively, get direct feedback from non-connected players who aren't part of the development process. CIG doesn't do that. Having your devs play the game doesnt count because their perspectives are biased and skewed.
@@saltemikereacts im aware they can do that, i'm simply saying that the "playtesting" valve is talking about is a very different thing that simply throwing a product to people and blindly watching their streams, namely because valve is obviously not releasing their products years before they're ready of course. the point is you do valves type of testing by making a feature, providing a presentation to someone blindly with that feature enabled, and t hen watching to see those exact features experienced. Livestreams and youtubers...it's too random and likely a waste of time for them.
CIG and Chris Roberts specifically need to put down the coke plate for a minute and have a serious discussion with the community. Stand up a user voice page that’s sole purpose is collecting user feedback on how fun or engaging things are for backers. It’s not fun to ride transit loops desyncing all over the place It’s not fun to have cookie cut stations and empty LZs It’s not fun to randomly and aimlessly mine for minerals It’s boring to have no market to sell in and no real market to sell information in It’s not fun to have ship parts unsalvageable clogging up stations and hangars It’s not fun to shoot AI who just stand there It’s not fun to see t posing assets everywhere CR would do well to see these things, prioritised by the community, and prioritise them internally.
But if we tell them that some of their design ideas are just bad, they will insult us as noise and use it as a reason to not listen to us any more. Because if we were as smart as them, we would certainly see how great this all will be....
one could be the best developer... CIG has it... what they lack is leadership to move things forward... a good manager or CEO is whats needed right now... I really want my game to come out... i agree to put the mechanics and gameply then polish and add... i dont want SC to fail... its time to put Roberts on creative and get a proper Leadership...
CIG: * providing absolutly low quality code on LIVE (constant wipes due incompetence like various exploits) * has no QA whatsoever on Star Citizen * created a marketing tool faking issue control * sometimes you also find bugs the developer must have seen if he tried to find bugs (so not even dev test - JUST COMPILE & DEPLOY) * CIG has no problem in providing "own solutions" for known game play problems. So first time idiots are designing MMO stuff and run into EVERY F'IN TRAP possible and then needing years to fix the issues they created (most of the problems could be avoided by copy&change solution from other MMO developers) TLDR: They provide utter shit and they dont care for years. If SQ404 has ANY issues (even small ones) on release, this will create a shit storm that has to be seen. Just because the shitty job they did on star citizen for 10 years. If this gets projected onto SQ404, it will be devastating.
Star Citizen isn't ready for play testing at the moment. And CIG aren't even watching what we do. The core of SC is supposed to be ship based combat. Everything else is supposed to support combat. But that's not what we're getting. CIG have failed to settle on a flight model in year 11 of the games development. Nothing else can be properly integrated until the core loop is in place. The funding model demands CIG release a more desirable ship every few months. So the last top tier light fighter is always being nerfed to make room for the new ship. It's a total mess and CIG don't have a clear path forward. They're hoping against hope we'll all be wowed by SQ42 if it ever releases. I think that will be the day when SC finally dies.
I do think that CIG does a pretty bad job at getting constructive feedback, spectrum threads are very unpredictable. Some amazing feedback gets filled with memelords who missed the point entirely, and some crappy feedback gets lauded like crazy because it's funny rather than useful. They need more tools like their regression thread tools. Make a post about how much of a shit job CIG did on something relatively aesthetic and not game breaking 100votes. Make a post about a specific issue (bad colmeshes at wrecks blocking projectiles, harvestables being 10% of their intented price, removing them as a gameloop participant) with specific evidence and specific recommendations, 3 votes - forgotten and archived.
One huge flaw with you comparing VALVE’s play testing with CIG’s Salty Mike: VALVE is play testing pieces of gameplay mechanics running on a highly polished and very much complete engine. CIG is allowing backers to test out, in development gameplay mechanics, whilst also allowing backers to play around with everything they have so far, running on a very much in development engine.
No CIG doesn't just release a broke version of Star Citizen..the core YT creators that whine every other video about SC still isn't a released game...and ummm the backers of SC are the play testers...am I on a Twighlight zone episode??? We are play testers people....omg..I thought that has been understood for oh..10 + years...wtf???
Star Citizen needs 4 years in the oven. No updates, no small missions or whatever. Get SQ42 out the door and bring Server meshing online so there are no things to use as an excuse anymore. You cant play test a game that has no reason to play other than dogfighting.
