Realistic Star Citizen Update – May 5th, 2018

Another update.

TL;DR – Yeah I'm doing one since this is such a long post.
CIG has some new ships that they're trying to whore sell. Of course they added some new mechanics with the new ships so more feature creep.
CIG wants you to know that they have 64 ships playable ingame now, good luck getting many of those to actually work. No meaningful updates on all those other ships CIG sold people before these new ships they're trying to sell now.
Some minor stuff got pushed from the 3.2 patch, that isn't showing much progress, to the 3.3 jesus patch that has become CIG's overloaded dumping ground for too many items.

Calling All Devs
-CIG isn't really working directly on the tech for flying into gas giants yet, they're working on the precursor tech now. This is a thing because CIG wants to have Cloud City style platforms in the gas giants and doesn't know when to cut features that are eating time like nuts.
-CIG is now working on swimming tech and animations, oh wait not yet. Just planned. Tech is probably over a year away as it's not listed on the roadmap.
-CIG is currently working on cleaning up all the crap animations ingame. mentions that they are trying to make it so players don't jerk around so much while moving.
-CIG is working on scanning mechanics, again, for real this time. Maybe. I mean they've been working on everything multiple times for years now, but this time it's for reals.
-CIG is working on new tech for creating warp-to points over planets. Yup, rather than work out mechanics to allow free-form warp CIG is working on tech to limit free flight.

Around the Verse
-Item kiosks are seeing some major work to improve the shopping experience. Wow, my life is now complete.
-CIG is at the “early prototyping” stage for the scanning mechanics visuals. Good thing it isn't due for release in a month and a half… oh wait…
-CIG is working on some RNG tech for adding clutter type props to areas so minor details change from visit to visit.
-Work has begun on the modelling of the city of Loreville. Looks super basic but I'm sure CIG will get it done in the few months before it's due for release…
-CIG says there are 64 ships ingame to play with now. Shame many of them are unplayably broken, have no supporting gameplay, or will require major reworks to work with game mechanics.
-52 more ships are on their way. Oh wait, CIG wants to add three more to this pile…
And then CIG spend the next 20 fucking minutes promoting their new ships for sale, another ship they're going to sell again soon, and a bunch of hypothetical gameplay that may someday exist that you need these ships for.
-The Carrack will be going to the R&D stage of ship development next month. This is despite repeated statements from CIG that it was further along or being worked on, instead it looks like any work will be mostly scrapped and the ship is back to the early stages of development again and will have to wait until 2019/2020 for release.

Reverse the Verse
-A fuckin' hour of CIG promoting their new ship sale, because fuck talking about the game, Star Citizen's about the $400+ spaceships.
-There's like 10 damn minutes of CIG's boys talking about how challenging it was to do concept art for this ship. Truly a triumph of the human spirit.
-More feature creep, the new ship brings a new game system with it. Planetary Bombing now needs to be developed.
-The Starlifter variant of the Starliner is dead, CIG needed to make an all new ship because reasons. Also they like money.
-The variant was't actually planned to be developed. Suddenly CIG dumping it into the “we'll get back to it someday” pile makes sense.
-Despite being the only ship so far that can officially transport the new Tanks CIG sold everyone the new can't support the tanks crew (beds/spawn and whatnot). Guess you'll need to buy a crew support ship for that.
-Tons of bullshit stats about some ships that exist as only pictures and CIG will probably shelve for so long everything will change by the time they actually get worked on.

Production Schedule
3.2
-The ship rework has been pushed back to 3.3.
-Generally a lot of tasks for 3.2 are sitting in the early stages of development still and are due for testing release in just a bit over a month, there's a concerning lack of progress on some major systems but it's possible they'll come together at the last minute before release.
-New mechanic for remotely operated vehicle has been added for this patch. So you can use the turret on the rovers.

3.3
-Good progress in some key areas like the new network tech but 3.3 is overloaded with many tasks that have been pushed back into it so overall progress is looking a bit shabby.
-Some new tasks related to the network tech were added but those were formerly subset items of the netcode item.

3.4 & 3.5
-Nothing really noteworthy, so weapons and junk items.

Weekly
Man… these ship sales. These endless ship sales… they're becoming the damn cancer that is going to kill this game, if it ever releases.

We've got literally years more of these sales before CIG has something else they can sell to sustain development and already this shit is turning into a gameplay and balancing nightmare to some degree.
Not to even mention the multi-year backlog of ships still needing development and all those now needing re-development to work with the new Star Citizen.
And even that doesn't get into the years worth of (at CIG speeds) game mechanics needing to be developed for many of these ships.

This weeks sale saw a transport/bomber/gunship shoved into a gap where the currently undeveloped gunship, Hammerhead gunship, bomber, Polaris (bomber?), bomber, and a few other ships are supposed to be sitting.
It's very much just shoving yet another ship into an already crowded role and then hamstringing the capabilities of other ships by adding new game mechanics to the new ship to justify its existence.

To me it's really looking like SC will have sold so damn many ships by the time it even gets to some sort of beta state that the game will be spending years just producing all the ships it sold, followed by redeveloping all the older ships to actually work with the game.
Balancing the ships for all the uses and meta-bullshit that could develop after selling so many ships is going to be a major headache.

Buying a ship at this point feels like you're just agreeing to be scammed, the timelines for delivery on some of CIG's ships are now going past five years with CIG starting to actually be untrustworthy on reported progress of some hulls and possible delivery dates.
You could very much buy a ship and have it delivered years later into a field now crammed with superior competitors to its intended role.

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