@RS13: That sounds very strange, because this was a common tactic I used to kill human enemies. The game tracks the alien's location and actions pretty much constantly, so it's possible it was doing something else and was busy.

The alien doesn't really react to Working Joes, as they aren't alive, but all human enemies I faced drew the alien like a very scary moth to tasty flames.

@DARREN636: That's because the reviewers were bad at the game. There were very specific rules for how the alien and other enemies behaved. If you die, 99% of the time it's because you made a mistake.

For example, this guy played the game through on hard in about four and a half hours without saving once; no saves, no reloads, no deaths. If the AI was terrible and caused random deaths, that means this guy just managed to luck out for the entire game on hard. But that's not what happened; he knew how the AI worked, and what limits it worked with.

@KerrinScott: That's just it...Star Citizen is an MMO. It's always been a combination of a single player game and an MMO, akin to The Old Republic with a much larger scope. Incidentally, The Old Republic started development around 2006 (the actual start date is unknown, but it was 2006-2007 at the latest) and was released in 2011, meaning that it took around 5 years to develop the base game. Again, this was a AAA game with publisher backing, so they had their full team (or close to it) working on it from the time the project was greenlit. Likewise, the estimates of project cost for The Old Republic are between $150 million to $200 million, less than GTA V at $265 million but still on the high end.

Actual development on Star Citizen didn't really begin until funding began, which was roughly October 2012, and even then the team had no idea how much funding they'd actually receive or the scope they'd be able to do, so the real development plans didn't get started until later. But even assuming that date was the beginning of full development, Star Citizen has only been in development for a little over 4 years. And they started with significantly less budget; the $141 million mark was just hit, which is extremely high for a crowd-funded game, but considering the average AAA game has a budget of around $60 million (and from the beginning, and often a sequel with existing assets, gameplay systems, and without significantly changing the game engine), this isn't particularly crazy from the point of view of comparable games.

One misconception is that there is a lot of feature creep in SC; this simply isn't true. They stopped adding planned features around the $40 million mark if I remember correctly. Just about the only "feature" planned that wasn't part of the Kickstarter stretch goals so far is the procedural planet tech (along with the atmospheric flight model, but that's not particularly time consuming), but that is actually a time saving feature as it will end up significantly reducing asset creation time and adds a huge amount of potential content. It also avoids some potential false advertising, as (again, IIRC) they released the planet landing advertisement with the "2001" style prior to knowing whether or not the procedural tech was viable. It's a feature that definitely fits within the core design principles, though.

Virtually every other feature, besides almost incidental and trivial features like pressure vessel modeling (which, although cool, is hardly a difficult thing to model from a programming perspective), are things that were promised in the original Kickstarter or by stretch goals. I think it's pretty hard to argue that they should cut their development time in order to release a game faster than normal for a AAA game with this scope, and thus providing less content than promised to their backers, just because most gamers aren't aware how long it takes to make a AAA game.

This article from Kotaku does a good job of explaining the ups and downs of the development of the game. It's hard to say if this is particularly abnormal; few games are developed this openly, with this scope, and none so far without an investor/producer return on investment restriction. You may read that article and decide that Star Citizen is doomed, mismanaged, and broken. I read it and see exactly what I was looking for when I purchased my entry ship...a game that won't compromise.

I see no evidence that development has stopped, or that the people making it have given up on it, so if it takes a long time, so what? I'm down $65, I've had fun with the "demos," and there are plenty of other short-term games out there to enjoy. As long as the game continues I don't really care if it takes another four years. I do a lot of investing, so perhaps I'm used to putting money into something and waiting five years or more for it to mature, but I'd rather wait on a higher return than freak out just because the market took a dip. That's how I see Star Citizen; an investment in a future game that I'll enjoy, not a purchase of a game now. That's the whole premise of things like Kickstarter, so I don't feel like I've been mislead. I also don't expect a perfect development, and having worked in management, the fact that some people don't like the way a project is going does not surprise nor bother me.

@geminij13: Agreed, I'm leaning towards 2020, but that's based on the current pace of development. If they get the core systems in place earlier, and it's just asset creation, they could theoretically get through the final push much faster than I expect. Keep in mind they're making a modular system, which is hard and takes time, but once that system is implemented, creating new content becomes much, much faster.

Theoretically, for example, a fully playable Stanton system could be built into a playable 10 systems within a few months of development time given all other systems in place, or less (they're already developing assets for other systems, and many things are going to be reusable).

The main reason I'm leaning towards 2020 is the shear number of systems to create and balance, from the dynamic economy/mission system, to fleshing out ship systems, to the numerous occupational systems such as exploration, rescue, tourism, mining, etc. Perhaps they can implement those things faster than I expect, but given the level of detail planned, I expect these systems to take some time and iteration to get right.

All of which is fine with me. I'd rather it take longer and be right than get done now and suck. I'm a programmer, so the complexity and difficulty of what they're trying to do isn't lost on me, so I suppose if I didn't really understand the difficulty in things many take for granted (for example, the demo where the player inside a base waved to a player in a ship, through three separate instance loads, without lag is an impressive feat from a programming standpoint, as is continual stream loading from space to planet surface with the level of detail implemented) it would seem much slower to me. Hard to say.

@geminij13: They asked backers if they should do this, and the community said no. This is a far more inefficient way to design the game, and would have inevitably ended up with a weaker product no matter how much they polished the turd. It is much more difficult to go back and fix poorly implemented systems and bad scaling, while still keeping the game playable, than just creating robust systems in the first place.

Ask any programmer if it's easier to build a shitty platform and fix the platform through patches, or to just build a solid platform in the first place, and I can't think of a single one that would recommend the former. In other words, if they had released a crappy game first, that would have delayed the eventual good game by basically all the time they spent on the crappy one, because it's unlikely much of it could be reused. Instead of Star Citizen taking 5-7 years for release it would have taken 5-7 years plus 2-4 years for the crappy game. No thanks.

I'm not sure what drop dates they're missing; they just released their internal timelines to the public at the end of last year, and the realities of game design make such things tentative. Adding a feature is easy. Debugging it and making sure it doesn't break other things is hard, and the amount of time this takes can vary widely. This is not unique to Star Citizen, it's just that most of the time it's simply hidden from gamers.

The only recent release "promise" was they intended to release 2.6 before the end of 2016. Which they did. Not sure what the problem is.

@dlaney34: What delays? What was the official release date that was missed? They're on schedule with their proposed timeline. You just don't like that timeline.

I see no evidence that it's a money pit, nor that the time spent is on management delays. They've been extremely open with their development process, far more than any other developer I can think of (only Subnautica comes close with their open development Trello board, but perhaps there is another).

In another year they'll have matched the typical timeline of a large scale AAA game development time, and they didn't have a full team working on it from day 1 like most AAA games would have (they had to scale up their team dramatically, meaning the first year or so was far slower than subsequent years). It sounds to me like you're ignorant of game development, not that there is an issue with their timelines.

@Karmazyn: Did you delete your USER folder after the last update? Other than that I'm not sure what the issue could be.

The Lumberyard change probably won't alter framerate much for now; the biggest differences are related to netcode, not graphics processing, and the Star Citizen team has changed the core graphics so much I doubt the engine changes will matter for now. Obviously they haven't gotten to an optimization level yet so the final product will be much smoother.

@isariamkia: Yeah, I would be shocked to have poor performance on the 1080. The only thing I could think of was high res along with crappy other components (especially right now SC is pretty harsh on the CPU).

I've had bugs, of course, but performance is rarely an issue, and a 1080 is a pretty decent upgrade to my 1060.

@techdemon: Maybe another generation of consoles. I'm also a backer of Subnautica, a fun but far less ambitious game than Star Citizen, and they've been having a nightmare getting the comparatively tiny gameworld running at a decent rate on the XB1. Star Citizen would set it on fire, then eat the wreckage.

@Hordriss: I'm a backer and I'm not upset in the slightest. What would make me upset is if they rushed to give us a half-assed product that's just another fancy-graphics space sim turn fest. You know what makes me excited about Star Citizen? Functional janitors. People eating and sleeping. Having to worry about oxygen and decompression. Being able to be an "airline pilot" and fly around tourists as a viable way of playing the game. All the little details that make the game world feel alive.

There are plenty of games out there that have decent space dogfighting, plenty of first person shooters with railroad campaigns, and plenty of MMOs with exclamation-point worlds. There are plenty of survival games out there. I'm not really interested in another one. I want a game that's all of those things, and more.

Even if Alpha there's more detail in the basic beginner ship, the starting station, and the general gameplay than most "early access" games ever achieve. Is there a long way to go? Sure. But I paid $65 total for my 315p and have had more fun already than every minute I played Titanfall or Evolve (two of my biggest mistakes). Why should I be upset when it's only going to get better?