Star Citizen vs. DC Universe Online: A Universe of Exploration or Guided Adventure?

Regardless it says it had 4 million people registered to it … although as with every game you don’t have to pay to play that defintiely
Have more registered than actually play daily

Just skimming their reddit plenty of people enjoy the game and can’t wait for it to get a beta and ultimately a full on release.

The game also has a portion of the community that is unhappy like any game would, along with its loyal players and its apologists.

Something I think is fair that they offer since the game is still in alpha … if you decide to pay before you play, and find the game is not for you, there is a 30 day money back guarantee. That’s a nice gesture when really they can say buyer beware and not pay back a dime.

Ngl the game looks good and if it was on ps5 I’d probably at the very least see what it’s like.

Probably not worth the time to port it at present. The PS15 should be out when it's ready to release.

I would hope there is some money back guarantee. You know.. because it’s in alpha?

And with that said. You said you don’t have to pay to play. Same as in dcuo where you don’t have to pay to play.

I guess my point was based on skimming their Twitter feedback and reddit feedback .. most don’t seem to care that it’s still in alpha and are enjoying it… of course there are some who are disappointed which is expected.

The goal is to make money and earn reputation. The progression is making money, earning reputation, later they will add gaining special skills and attributes, I posted about everything you can do currently in game... no you don't have to grind missions, but you can if you want to. You can just make money with no missions accepted by looting, mining, salvaging, being a criminal, becoming a trader, etc... But even with missions there are numorous of them. No, you buy ships, then you can upgrade the components and weapons of the ship. Then you can do missions with others as you can't pilot the ship and use turrets at the same time. There is PvP in the game, you can earn not only money, but gear, clothes, special weapons both vehicle and NPC. When they introduce new solar systems, you can continue to discover strange new worlds. In the future, you can purchase land and build a home base there and have it defended how you see fit. I currently have the biggest ship in game and I basically use it like a home base. What keeps players logged in is there is always something to do to improve your stats and make more money. And as time goes on there will be more ships in the game that are even more expensive... They are working on a few Captial Ships...worth MILLIONS of creds. Takes alot of work to make that money. The endgame is non-existant. It's an MMO. As long as there is money to be made, there is something to do. Reputation makes more money and get other benefits. I've been working on just 1 reputation for 2 months now and still not at level 5. And there are about 20 different facts currently to get reputation for. And this game isn't as repetitve as DCUO... every bounty hunter mission is different along with the others....Bunker missions currently are mostly the same, but b/c of the state of the server, they are slow to react to you... They are working on that as we speak to make them instantly recognize you as a target and start shooting.

This game has brought in over 400 million dollars and still gaining more funds to produce this game.... I'm glad they are taking their time to get it right. Also, whatever dates they set for patch releases or new content releases... they are target dates, and not everyone hits their targets, look at storm troopers.

ok, for all you people who are talking about games like EVE Online and Star Citizen, if your not willing to try it out, atleast watch the videos on it before you criticize. Don't be like Whoopie and just talk about stuff you haven't even seen.

No, DCUO wouldn't accept it b/c there is SO little things to do already. However, Even at the stage Star Citizen is in, we all still get mad when the servers have to come down for a second because we have so much to do. You can play Star Citizen for days straight and not do the same thing twice. And the visuals are stunning.

Your comparison is inadequate (sorry for being rude, but "stupid" would be a more appropriate word here ...). You are comparing all alpha content created in 10 years with one DLC created in half a year. If you want to be taken seriously, compare all available content from both games for a brand new player.

From what I read a quarter of their investors want their money back. I’m sure even those with the most flexible and lenient expectations weren’t expecting to still be waiting on a beta a decade later. They’ve been mired in lawsuits from investors wanting their money back which I’m sure is eating up time and resources but that’s what happens when you take people’s money and never deliver.

It shouldn’t take ten years to “get it right”. I’m sure a lot of their time and resources go towards redoing, remaking, updating, etc their previous work to keep up with current gaming tech. Thankfully that’s easier on PC than console but still. Their running on their own proprietary engine but all game engines become outdated and eventually totally obsolete after some time. Ever notice there’s a number after Unreal Engine? UE is on it’s fifth iteration because UE, UE2, UE3 and UE4 don’t cut it anymore. How much of their time and resources are going towards repeatedly updating or rebuilding their own engine to keep with the times? At this pace whatever tech is being currently utilized will already be outdated if not obsolete by the time it launches. For their sake I do hope they eventually “get it right” but realistically it’s more likey that most of their work is just repeatedly updating what they’ve already done as opposed to progressing forward towards a complete launch-ready game. When it does launch they might as well call it “Star Citizen: Remastered…yet again”

Exactly. A console version isn’t even remotely feasible at their current development pace. They’d have had to rebuild the game from the ground up twice already and would probably be doing preliminary work on a third rebuild for the PS6. In the gaming industry studios have to be able to develop faster or at least as fast as the technology advances.

Star Citizen is pretty much built on hype and sunken cost fallacy at this point.

Heck.. When it does launch... It will be called "Senior Citizen"

Feels like comparing apples and oranges.

One game is more than a decade past release. It has already had it's huge release boom and initial investment, and now it's a revenue generator. With DCUO, the present goal is to take the work that has already been done, add a minimum amount of effort to repackage it every so often, and monetize it. This is standard practice for an MMO in maintenance mode and there is nothing wrong with it. When the game is effectively limited to it's current playerbase and not drawing in huge numbers of new players (by virtue of being old enough that everyone interested has already tried it), then investing trucks full of money into the game results in money being lost. Instead, you get smart with your resource allocation. Snip sections out of an old map, run them in reverse and in a slightly different sequence, and it LOOKS like a new map. Take enemies from an old stage, add a new particle effect to them or have them carrying a different weapon graphic, and they feel like new enemies. Put a very small amount of work into something, create something just new enough to keep the current players interested, and continue the treadmill. It's how business works.

Star Citizen is something entirely different. First off, it's in development. It's not done. And much like other games that I greatly looked forward to, like City of Titans or Everquest Next, that proposed stuff truly revolutionary... I don't think it's ever getting finished. I do believe it's what they WANT to do. I don't believe they have the money necessary to make it happen. And as they wait and postpone the game to make it happen, the technology continues to improve, and so their goals grow loftier and loftier. They haven't completely built the game they wanted to make 10 years ago, but over the course of those 10 years, and by "taking feedback from the Alpha Test players", they have managed to add a huge list of extra stuff they also want to do.

Stop and think about this for a moment as a math problem.

We have X amount of money.

We want to make a game with X + Y amount of content.

We can't afford to.

We wait to try to raise Y amount of money too, but it takes so long that now our goal is X + 3Y amount of content.

Functionally speaking, you will always be able to wish for more than you can actually make. That's just the reality of life. You can imagine more than you can create, because imaginations are limitless.

2011 development date is honestly not too far off from DCUO's own Alpha test. The games are within a couple of years of age of each other.

You cannot take the game that DCUO is, and compare it to the game that Star Citizen wishes it someday will be. Imagination and hypotheticals do not count. "In the future" and "eventually" and "sometime later" does not win bonus points. If DCUO said they were going to introduce 20 new powersets, the playerbase would be stoked. But if 10 years passed and none of those powersets actually happened, only the most ignorant of players would say "Gee. I need to stick around because someday they're going to make that Kryptonian powerset that I really wanted." Somedays don't count. We compare results versus results, not results versus intentions.

Lastly, I'd simply point out the difference between a Superhero game and a Space Simulator. Since your complaint is repetition versus randomization, I would definitely note the genre. It is incredibly viable to have a randomized planet or star system that is generated from a random sequence of combinations to provide a randomized and not predictable experience.

In a Superhero game though, there has to be a story. We have canon characters, world-building, and lore. Everybody needs to have a shared experience, because future expansions will build upon that experience. The story actually matters.

And trying to shoehorn randomness into a superhero game honestly feels pretty dumb. Anyone who remembers Marvel Heroes will recall the Diablo style Affixes that would be added to bosses on higher difficulties, with no real explanation why Venom is now summoning Brood henchmen, or why Doctor Octopus is shooting waves of fireballs. You can add randomness, but doing so either hurts the story (villain here is random, so there can be no story leading up to it about them), or makes no sense (powers and/or mechanics become random).

You can like Star Citizen if you like it. Good on you. But I've been with DCUO since Alpha, and while I haven't liked every change they've made (I'm still very anti-Stat Clamp), overall they have created a game that is fun enough I have been playing at the top levels for over a decade. DCUO is doing plenty of things right. DCUO does not need to try to mimic a game that is so unrealistic and financially irresponsible that they can't even get their Beta Test ready within a decade.

Guys, you all are missing the point..... I'm not comparing the games themselves.... One is a superhero game, one is a space game.

What I'm doing and removing the argument that MMOs are all grind and limited... You have to just get mission, enter instance, kill everything, leave, repeat. What I'm saying is that is just what DCUO is.... I'm sure there are other games like SC I can compare it to to prove that the model they are using for DCUO isn't the only one there can be... I'm only talking about the variety of activities not bound by a daily or weekly or monthly limit. I can play for days without stop (as long as the server doesn't crash) and not run out of different things to do. And plus, multi crew ship (meaning can't use the ship unless real people are on and in the ship with you) are huge. A capital ship MAX crew complement could be up to 20-40 people at one time.... that is the MAX, a minimum might be like 5 or 6.

I'm not comparing anything but the fact that "No, MMOs don't have to be grindy doing 1000 of the same mission to get a feat or currency to get the new elite gear".

I decided to make my movie and game reviews on a different website... https://primesreviews.com

The alternative "model" you're comparing DCUO to is a pipedream until proven otherwise by actually launching, proving commercial viability and self-sustained longterm growth and longevity. It's a fantastic concept, I'm not denying that and I don't think anybody else is either. Can it work as a commercial viable product? Can a development studio stay afloat and solvent with it being their only product? Until the answers to that are "yes" then it's only a concept, a glorified wishlist.

Has it occurred to you that perhaps having limitless things to do is what makes the game so grandiose that it can't be finished while it's still technologically relevant? And if so, you can only imagine how that'll impact future continual live-service development. It's not the same amount of work for a dev team to make a new DLC/skill tree/play mode/etc for a game that has 5-10 main objectives vs a game that has 100+ objectives. The latter is monumentally more work. So when they want to add something new to this game with it's limitless things to do, it's gonna take exponentially more manpower which costs exponentially more money and/or time. If they had the ability to freeze time then sure, they could do years worth of work and complete that work while it's still relevant and while it's still within the timeframe of meeting customers'm reasonable expectations. But on the same note, if Dimensional Ink could freeze time the DLC's would have 3,4,or 5 raids, gigantic open world maps with options of 15 different bounty/bosses, new mechanics etc, etc. Despite not being profitable, we'd have new powers just for funzies and bi-annual balance passes.

But freezing time isn't possible. It's really looking like somewhere along the line the Starship Citizen developers will have to make a choice, scale the game to a manageable size so that it can actually be completed, launched and added on to or continue with what is by all accounts a grandiose pipe-dream that will never be finished, let alone built upon.

The irony in this whole thing is that you're holding it up as proof that MMO's can be so much more when really the fact that it can't get past alpha stage is proof that commercially viable MMO's have to be the way they are or else they'll suffer from nothingwillevergetdone-ism.

Duplicate Post

No one said all MMOs are copy paste from one to the next… what has been said is that MMOs have different models which they stick to throughout its lifetime. Do you think star citizen will all of a sudden make a dlc that is like that I’m dcuo or that of other MMOs? No.

And FYI it’s still a grind. Just a different kind of grind.

You should research posts from the past.. Everything I talk about adding more variety to the game over the years, I got the same response... "Thats what MMOs are".... or variously different versions of the same saying.

A grind is repeating the same exact thing 10000000000000000000000000 times as there isn't much else to do to get the rewards your trying to get. However, if you have several (in Star Citizen hundreds and in the future a whole lot more) then it's less of a grind and more of actual gameplay. Grind is a negative term for being forced to repeat the same limit missions or activities way too much for a reward that in DCUO doesn't really matter that much.