Star Citizen player reports CIG is making him sign an NDA before getting a refund

And how exactly does a free fly invalidate the article about refunds requiring an NDA? Nobody is questioning whether there's is some semblance of a game in a project that has been in development for over a decade, it would be a massive red flag if there's wasn't. What people are questioning is why is there a secret shop page that players can access ONLY after they've spent a thousand dollars on the game, and then another secret shop page after they've spent 10k? What's up with the predatory practices?

Is your response "No no no, don't look at those controversies. Look at how pretty the game is"? A free fly event doesn't invalidate the claim that you might need to sign an NDA to get a refund. It doesn't invalidate the claim that the devs had to pull 7 day work weeks. There are loads of criticism that the free fly does not address at all. These articles would exist even if everyone tried the free fly.

From my experience games that get "hate articles" are games that are already doing questionable things. You don't get such articles circulating about good games because that shit just won't stick. When it comes to SC and CI that shit does stick.

I've played it several times during those.

It's never improved. It's a piece of shit game designed to take money from morons.

Defending it isn't going to make your loss of money any less painful.

I love these encouragements. Yes,by all means,play it during a free flight event and see what a POS tech demo it is. Good luck completing a single mission without dying to endless bugs or having top notch hardware to even hope of it being a fairly decent experience.

In the year 2024 CIG doesn't even know what FSR 1 is. They've been promising Vulkan for years now. Even single indie dev games have it to some extent.

SC will never be finished.

Do you have any source for that claim regarding MOP and The Escapist? Just bringing up that quote isn't a magical "I am right" button.

I tried their free trials 4 times. Twice I encountered game breaking bugs (required a restart and switching servers respectively).

Let's ignore that for now. I will start with the good things. The planet to space transition was pretty cool, not going to lie. The cities were also detailed and looked nice (the first time you take the train in one of the cities, it does contribute to the world building). That being said, both the planets and the POI have nothing to offer in terms of actual gameplay structure. The cities might as well be a menu based system for purchases/interactions. The planets just have some random uninspired mission locations that all feel the same. You might as well have a separate map that you enter via cutscene.

But the biggest issue was the horrible gameplay. It's one of the reasons I believe star citizen is a scam.

I will use a small trading indie game called Merchant of the Skies as a comparison point. It was developed by a husband and wife duo in less than 12 months. The game has:

• Dynamic world impacted by trading activities. City taxation/reputation, new resources, new locations, new ships and upgrades all open up as you complete various trading missions.
• Bazaar system. There are several location on a map that have weekly bazaars. Certain days have peak visitors while others are off days. You have to time your arrivals/trading.
• Supply and demand system in bazaar sales. You over/under price your goods depending on how much of your ship's inventory you want to sell. This is also tied to the weekly visitors intensity system.
• Refueling system. Locations on the edge of the map have refuelling station that are few and far between. There is a simple RNG system for bonus fuel during travels.
• Mail/passenger travel side missions. You can occasionally help travellers and deliver mail. It's fun to align this with your trading activities.
• Different late-game ships that you can pick depending on your play-style (it's not only about cargo capacity, it does actually have a relatively big impact on how you go about the game).

This is just the gameplay that is relevant for comparison. There is also in-depth base-building, complex trade fleets and delivery scheduling, a simple RPG system, a simple ship employee system, a simple bank system, a resource gathering system, rudimentary exploration (map is randomized on each run), a mainline story and a bunch of different side missions.

Now compare that to star citizen. No supply/demand. No world impact. No economy. There is nothing to do except get more money to get ships. Sure you play with other players, but is there any kind of competition in terms of trading? They don't even have a functional escort system where you can hire NPC ships for defence against griefers.

And crude gameplay is not limited to trade. FPS combat with single digit ticks? Exploration with one fully explored system? I will add that they sell non-functional "exploration ships" for hundreds of dollars; some of them are literal JPEGs. There is a bunch of other stuff that they've marketed but have simply not implemented or completely abandoned after the initial cash shop sales campaign (data running, journalism spaceships, refuelling spaceships, passenger transport spaceships, medical spaceships, farming spaceships, flying bazaar spaceship, mine laying spaceship, the list just goes on and on).

And this is after ~12 years and allegedly ~$750 million spent on development.

I will speculate a lot of that money goes to the founder's family, key insiders and friends and they knowingly lie about their capabilities, intentions and just make shit up to sell JPEGs.

You don't have to agree with the last point, but am I wrong with respect to trading/hauling in SC?

Star Citizen is a game that exists, so sure, maybe "scam" isn't the right word for it, but they're still insanely sketchy. They constantly make promises they never meet, constantly beg the community for more funding when they already have an outrageous amount of funding, add insanely overpriced microtransactions to try to profit off whales, etc...

SC is driven by hype and nothing else. So many years later it still runs like ass and is very barebones, there's a giant question mark on where all that money went and how the project is being handled. No Man's Sky had a fraction of the budget and size and they managed to do so much more.

At best it's the worst managed video game project of all time.

I was going to side with you, but then I visited their webpage. 12 necessary cookies? This company is scummy.

I have played it and it spends the entire time trying to make me buy virtual ships for real money. And this isn't microtransactions either, this is substantial quantities of cash.

If it was just a bit of a cash grab but it was otherwise an okay game I guess it would be acceptable. But there's nothing to the game, all you do is you fly around in your basic ship because you refuse to buy a good one, and shoot pirates. It doesn't do anything that you can't do in Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky.

Yeah I go through all the contracts and paperwork and I am never wild about any of them but this is one of two types of things I refused to sign despite losing a fair sum with them. I totally get people signing them though as its a tough loss to deal with. There needs to be laws around reasonableness of contracts.

nice.

I had an employer (wrongfully) terminate me and they wanted me to sign a similar thing. I asked if I could just… not. My (very cool, forced to do this) manager said “absolutely.” I didn’t sign it. I applied for unemployment. Started getting free money.

They fought it. I had a conference call with a judge and that same manager. I was shaking. The judge asked “MANAGER, did you have any reason to suspect that Rai did the thing they’re accused of doing?”

“Nope.”

End of call.

Thank you for the year of playing TF2 for 40 hours a week, dope-ass manager.

I did. Means I lost a severance they waived in my face. I think most people actually take the deal but wtf man this is crazy.

This is a large part of it. But there is also other people who have put the minimum amount or no money into it and just want a cool space game and also want the developers to not be pressured into rushing updates out (they were once and it was unplayable for a month). I am not defending the sketchy stuff cig have done, they really need to look at how they manage this game and their business, I would have gladly put more than the bare minimum into the game if they didn't charge so much for everything beyond the first purchase (about £35) but they do too much wrong for me to support it any more than I have

claiming Bethesda tried anything with starfield is pretty generous.

To me NoMansSky feels like singleplayer Minecraft but with planets and tasks/missions.
So if you arent fond of that, I'm afraid it's not for you. You can play witg randoms but I would say this isnt the norm.

Honest question, what does it give that eve doesn't? If X4 is a good alternative why is eve really so lacking? Give it a try, do a level 1 security mission in a merlin, it's very similar to X4