Expect 100 GB Install Size, 6 GB Patches For Star Citizen

[lacktheknack]

The two mentalities cancel each other out. If you're over-budgeting, be over-ambitious. When you have one and not the other, that's where problems happen. I'm all for AAA getting kicked into higher ambition.

I still can't play Star Citizen in the foreseeable future, but if it succeeds, I'm OK with that.

And here, we already see the damage this game is doing.

Over-ambition is reigned in by a frugal budget and release schedule. It forces people to come up with creative solutions instead of say...

RSI Comm Link [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14568-Design-The-New-Damage-System]
Two other areas we wanted to improve on were the time it takes our artist to create the numerous damage states for each part of the ship, and the hefty memory cost these meshes come with, which could prove to be a problem as we scale up the game. The reason the damage states are so labour intensive is that each ship has over ten main parts, and each of these requires five damage states to represent the different levels of damage, then each of these requires up to five simplified meshes that we use when they?re further from the camera to save performance. This equates to over 200 meshes per ship!

this, this is an overtly indulgent budget feeding off of ambition. It's a "let's throw money at our problems!" mentality.

You have no use for a gaming version of Caligula?

Awww. I was enjoying the ride.

 

[RedDeadFred]

That would take me a day to download... It's doable, and I don't have to worry about a cap, but why is it so big? I get that the game has amazing graphics, but isn't a fairly sizable portion of the game just space?

If the game turns out to be amazing (I'm doubtful) I will certainly pick it up, but it really sucks for the people who have to deal with download limits. It just seems like a bit of a middle finger to what could very well be a large portion of their backers. But hey, they've already got their money so that doesn't really matter.

Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but I tend to assume the worst about pretty much every game developer.

On the contrary, I see this as them doing exactly what they should be doing for their backers: making the best game possible. This is supposed to be a PC game for PC gamers, no fucking compromises, and if people actually backed the project in the expectation they'd be able to play something running on a heavily modified version of the Crysis Engine on the decrepit fucking Difference Engine they use to play WoW, well, a fool and his money are soon parted as they say.

SC will have multiple large landing locations on planets, all of which you can set down on and walk around in FPS mode, the same for space stations, not to mention the various PoI locations where you can go EVA and explore in zero-G. Some of the larger ships are as large as an FPS level, and all the multiplayer ships plus a few of the singleplayer ones have an interior that you can move around in while flying in space. Not to mention all the "maps" for the ingame VR simulator modes that let you just play pew-pew in FPS/your ship.

SC is two or three big modern games rolled into one, why is it a shock to people that it needs two or three big games' worth of assets?

Maybe, but I'll wait until the finished product to decide if it really ends up being that big. There are plenty of huge games out that aren't even a third of this game's size, so yes, I am skeptical. If it does end up being that huge and delivers on all of the things you just mentioned, I will absolutely get the game. Believe me, I want it to be great, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[Doom972]

Looks like this won't be the Eve killer after all (not that the mechanics of the game ever made that a possibility anyway).

But seriously, who is going to download that in an age where the majority of us still have caps? I know I'm not even considering it now (I was before) and I have a 250GB cap, about as high as they get.

I know that data caps are common in Canada and the US, but I'm not sure if it's a global problem. In my country (Israel) data caps only exist for mobile web. Maybe some people from other countries can comment and say if it's common in their countries.

 

[Silvianoshei]

Wow there is so much hating in this thread...Star Citizen is very much on track for completion and has released content modules at most a few weeks late. It's got a 300 person team and tens of millions in funding, as well as an already dedicated player base.

I would be with you if there was any indication that something was wrong...but they've been really on-point with their releases and are so open with their development process that many times they crowd-source solutions to many of the problems that they've faced in terms of the sheer scale of the project.

I don't get what there is to be so blindly pessimistic about. You can be skeptical and hold your money until you see the finished product (a perfectly valid option), which won't launch till 2016, but nothing about SC's development yells "trainwreck".

 

[Jupiter065]

Install size is not the same as download size, with proper compression the download could be smaller than a third of that, so y'all can stop freaking out about your download caps.

Anyway, hopefully this ends up more fun than Elite: Dangerous, that game bored me out of my skull after 2 hours.

 

[Rattja]

Haha, read about this on a Norwegian site and they were all like "Oh yeah bring it on! The bigger the better!"
Come here and it's all like "Oh fuck that shit"

It's still not coming out for a while so things can change a lot until then, one could hope anyways.

 

[Gatlank]

I'm not heavily invested in the whole Elite vs SC argument, but I will say that this is pretty much the reason that E is always online (besides the fact that it's an MMO anyway) because 400 billion systems is a lot of data, so it can be downloaded as needed. At least I think that's how it works, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

The always online has nothing to do with it. In fact always online can be disadvantageous because you wont even be able to play the SP mode (remember Diablo's error 37) if you lose your internet connection or the servers go down.
The only problem of a 100gb size and big updates is that it can be a deterrent to people with crappy internet connections, slow speeds, data caps and how to give a physical copy to those who asked for one.

 

[Shinkicker444]

Perhaps they could have two separate downloads, one for the people with huge caps and awesome PCs, and then a "middle" range DL which is a bit more conservative, like say Elite level detail.

 

[NoX 9]

I get unlimited internet access at great speeds trough the magic of fiber-optic cable, and at very low prices. I'm not concerned about the size, but I admit I didn't consider how big it might get. Still 400-500 GB of space on my 1TB game drive though, so that should be fine.

Sucks for everyone that backed and have terrible download speeds and/or limits on how much data they can download. I imagine most people buying a game of this type has 100GB of space to spare though.

 

[Vigormortis]

Something somewhere went horribly wrong.

I believe it was the moment when the project was split up between no less than six different development studios.

I mean, for fuck's sake, even Call of Duty isn't spread as thin.

Everytime I hear about Star Citizen I feel like im watching a trainwreck slowly happen.

This is how I've felt going on a year now. I'm almost fearful of the ramifications of the game turning out poorly. There's going to be a lot of anger, a lot of animosity, a lot of serious questions raised, and a lot of doubt thrown towards the dev(s) and Kickstarter projects that just "got too big".

I just get this feeling like the whole project is going to go down in history as "that moment the gaming community banded together to massively fund an ambitious, indie project, and it all crumbled like a house of cards." I really hope that isn't the case. I really, really do.

 

[Callate]

So in case if you were still wondering if there was any chance this game might one day come to consoles... I think that's a pretty definitive answer.

Yumpin' Yiminy.

 

[Atmos Duality]

A bloated file footprint for a bloated project.
Definition of "First World Problems" right there.

I have no interest in this anymore. That would take literal days on my connection to complete, and I'm not even confident it would complete without some corruption.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Makes me miss the days where a 6 to 10 GB game was considered huge.

 

[pilar]

Well Chris Robert's middle name is ambition. And whilst the cynics fold their arms in their stalwart hope it'll fail, he and the rest of his team are actually getting on with it.

100gb might be a little hard to explain to the billpayers,. mind.

Being cynical doesn't mean you want the game to fail. It just means people are being realistic in their idea of what a game developer is. They're a business and they want to make money. Making huge promises is nothing new with game devs and it doesn't usually end well. Just because people aren't jumping on the hype train, it doesn't mean they want the game to fail. I'd love for the game to succeed. If it delivers on most of what it promises, it'll probably be one of my favourite games of all time. I just don't expect that to happen.

Call me pessimistic if you want, but I've never had buyer's remorse when it comes to any video game I've purchased. Not saying you have, but it does seem to happen quite a bit in this industry.

Roberts has a different interpretation for what a 'PC enthusiast' is. But apparently, this 100GB patch is just the starter package or something.

 

[Frankster]

Guess this game is either going to be the most life changing amazing game made so far, or it will fail completely.

Either way, it's going to be interesting see what final result turns out

*grabs popcorn*
*puts back popcorn upon realizing game still won't come out for a long while*

 

[dochmbi]

I've never had a cap on my internet connection, couldn't even imagine having to consider that. All connections have been uncapped where I live, pretty much since the days of ISDN.

 

[Redryhno]

Wow there is so much hating in this thread...Star Citizen is very much on track for completion and has released content modules at most a few weeks late. It's got a 300 person team and tens of millions in funding, as well as an already dedicated player base.

I would be with you if there was any indication that something was wrong...but they've been really on-point with their releases and are so open with their development process that many times they crowd-source solutions to many of the problems that they've faced in terms of the sheer scale of the project.

I don't get what there is to be so blindly pessimistic about. You can be skeptical and hold your money until you see the finished product (a perfectly valid option), which won't launch till 2016, but nothing about SC's development yells "trainwreck".

I would agree with you, but the only news I ever hear of this game is that they're asking for more money, ship polygons, and "how awesome it's gonna be guys, just you wait!".

I have no interest in alot of what this game was promising, FPP planet scanning? I can play Space Engineers or Starbound if I want something like that honestly, heck, even Skyrim/Oblivion with mods has some space magic planet wandering(I think, I could be thinking of another game like M&B, who actually encourage you to mod and the devs have picked up a few modders from their forums for full-time).

And a 100Gb download with patches close to 10Gb? That's just...not feasible for a large part of the PC audience. You can have the most kickass PC imaginable, but the game is gated by having fast internet or you'll be sitting around for three days waiting for the base game, and everytime they decide to patch it is another half day of doing nothing else. It's a waste of time as far as I'm concerned and I was somewhat interested despite all the other crap I'd heard about the game, but this is honestly the nail in the coffin for me, and for all the talk of hating, looks like it was for alot of other people too.

I'm honestly fully expecting this to fail now. And I don't mean gaming imploding on itself cockamamee, but it just not making a fraction of the money back poured into the project and alot of people getting ticked off that the project they backed what...five years ago(?) ending in it becoming a niche's niche game for the precious few lucky to be blessed with internet capable of supporting the download without corruptions, interruptions, and general annoyances related to it. Or even worse, people buying it and never getting around to playing it because they don't want to have to update for three days to play.

 

[TT Kairen]

The two mentalities cancel each other out. If you're over-budgeting, be over-ambitious. When you have one and not the other, that's where problems happen. I'm all for AAA getting kicked into higher ambition.

I still can't play Star Citizen in the foreseeable future, but if it succeeds, I'm OK with that.

And here, we already see the damage this game is doing.

Over-ambition is reigned in by a frugal budget and release schedule. It forces people to come up with creative solutions instead of say...

RSI Comm Link [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14568-Design-The-New-Damage-System]
Two other areas we wanted to improve on were the time it takes our artist to create the numerous damage states for each part of the ship, and the hefty memory cost these meshes come with, which could prove to be a problem as we scale up the game. The reason the damage states are so labour intensive is that each ship has over ten main parts, and each of these requires five damage states to represent the different levels of damage, then each of these requires up to five simplified meshes that we use when they?re further from the camera to save performance. This equates to over 200 meshes per ship!

this, this is an overtly indulgent budget feeding off of ambition. It's a "let's throw money at our problems!" mentality.

This information is what they USED to have. Now they have a much lighter, voxel based damage system that looks better and plays better.


Your attitude is a bit saddening to me, however. It seems like the current shitty climate of the games industry has killed your optimism that games can be more than what they are. Star Citizen is changing that. It's a developer who's ambition is driven by passion, this is the game he's making because it's the game he and his backers want to play. Not because some corporate asshole at a publisher sees dollar signs.

 

[Yan007]

Frankly, I don't understand why people have their panties in a bunch over this. The devs made it very clear from the very beginning this would be a big project that would consume a lot of resources.

Is 100GB a lot of data? Probably, especially if you think of going SSD (although this year has pretty good deals on 250GB drives so far). Then again, you don't see me whine about console exclusive titles for consoles I don't own and how unfair I'd have to pay a $400-500 premium just to play that one exclusive I really want to play. I currently own a WiiU and my PC and I'm looking at the PS4 simply to buy and play the Dragon Quest Warriors game coming out later this year. That's a lot of money for one game, but that's my hobby and nobody is pointing a gun to my head. Samely, I'll probably end up buying a new rig when/if I decide SC is good enough to warrant it. I'm pretty sure we won't see the game come out this year or the next so what is a lot in terms of data and PC-power today will be a moot point at that point in the future.

I have a pretty good PC atm and I'm running everything at max straight to my 65 inch hdtv, sometimes in 3d if the game has the option. Kinda sad when you realize my PC is almost 4 years old right now. I don't want to go PC master race here, but it's obvious consoles have been holding back PC games for a while now and I hope that someday the trend will be reversed so that PCs can force console makers to design machines that are much more powerful than what we have right now, for the good of all gamers.

To make this clear though, I have no idea how well my PC would run SC. I did not back the game at all so far because it was made very clear from the start they would push PC hardware limitations as far as they possibly could during production and I see no reason to give them money for a product that does not exist yet or that I couldn't run yet.

 

[aaronexus]

TLR Vastly increased file sizes aren't anything new for anyone who's been gaming since the nineties, and is a good sign they're going to really push the limits. File size for Star Citizen is currently only 20Gb, which is not bad at all. The space combat in Star Citizen is hands down the best I've ever played, which is a good sign. Limited scope and ambition from people with large bank accounts is the real cancer of modern AAA gaming and it's pretty stupid to ask people to limit the budget instead of asking for something worth $50 or $60.

Eh, it's not really a problem for backers that update regularly. The file size has grown slowly over the past year or two, and I imagine it will continue to grow slowly over the next two. So long as you continue to update, you'll get it piecemeal, no problem. Sucks for people with sucky ISPs. I don't blame them at all for losing interest. The game is currently sitting at around 20Gb, and for people that buy a physical copy of the game will get around that much as a kernel to ease the downloading woes, but it's a lot to ask for people with ISPs stuck in the past. Fortunately for those of us with relatively modernized tech, CIG isn't skimping on the details. If game ambition had kept to it's 90's scale, every game today would have over 100Gb installs, and that's what CIG is promising. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been gaming on PC for long. I remember goggling at 1Gb installs. This is nothing new, just a natural extension of gaming. Still, it does boil down to good for me, not good for you. Eh, it is what it is. If nothing else, you can always watch let's plays and Twitch streams of it, if you really can't afford the download. Who knows, maybe CIG will be able to sell it on blu-ray, you never know. There's always hope. Till there's not.

I do find the end of the world conspiracy theorists amusing though. Skepticism is encouraged, I was skeptical at first, too, but I only take it seriously from people who've actually researched the game as I did. I've played over a dozen different space sims all the way back to the original Star Wars title(which wasn't technically a sim) and Star Citizen has, hands down, the best combat I've ever played. Flying in decoupled mode is like a religious experience. It didn't start out like that, though. The first iteration was kind of meh, but each bimonthly patch drastically improved the experience, and it continues to get better. For a guy for whom space sims are his favorite genre, it's only slightly tongue in cheek to say that Star Citizen is like the second coming. That's why Star Citizen's base is so rabid. We aren't just gamers, we're space sim fans. Anyone who isn't, just won't get it. It's like being an FPS fan who hasn't seen a decent FPS in twenty years. You'd be slightly rabid and desperate, too.

Obviously space combat is only one example of gameplay CIG is claiming to include, so they have a lot to prove still. But given the amazing job they've done so far, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until the time comes it is no longer warranted. This year will see the release of both the persistent universe and the first episode of the single player experience, which is apparently sitting at around 20hrs of gametime. That should prove one way or the other to all but the most die hard haters and fanboys whether it's going to hit it's goal or not. Some are betting it won't. Some, like me, are betting it will. We'll see.

And expecting people with large budgets to be unambitious is the real problem with the AAA industry today. That's why we get lame examples like Evolve sucking all your money for virtually no content. In the 90s you couldn't walk across a gaming aisle without tripping over a title with a new genre or unique gameplay. That's why I like PC. Give me an ambitious game over one that plays it safe any day, even if it doesn't all work perfectly. So far, though, Star Citizen works pretty damn good.