I do think major bug fixes should be mentioned more. The devs don’t just add fancy new things, they work their ass off to remove really annoying bugs, which are so nice to be gone. :) morph I love your videos, thanks!
As a software dev, bug fixes often take much longer than new features (the smaller ones at least). They are a massive pain in the butt to find, often fixing one unveils another!
That’s the top thing they did this year: comparing 3.18 to 3.22 is night and day and has required enormous amounts of hard work to reach such a good live experience and state. Credit to the devs and testers.
@@UselessnoobcowThis. A lot of times the bugs aren't even associated with the thing they affect. It could be a graphics bug that causes a physics bug to completely flip out, and finding the cause of it can sometimes drive somebody crazy. I used to hate having to scour through lines of code to find what was actually causing bugs, because it was never what was expected.
I think the reason for the difference in opinion about the progress is how you're measuring progress. Coming from a software architecture and systems engineering background, the progress this year was tremendous. In my opinion, it has moved from a demo and prototype into an actual alpha; that is it has the framework in PES to actually perform as a proper persistent game. Something it was lacking before, and meant the software infrastructure would never have been publishable. You can't rely justify a code base that can't ever do its job as an 'alpha' build. This is sort of the line between prototypes of systems cobbled together, and a production backbone that you're building features on to. Sure, from a player perspective, who's looking at this as nothing more than a game, it seems light. But that's not where we're at. This was moving from a set of features stuck together to a finally integrated infrastructure. That's why PES was so painful.. it was a huge transition and progress leap forward. Once we get server meshing in and things stabilized a little, the team can focus whole heartedly on all the player-facing work that you would see as progress. And I'm coming at this from over a decade and a half of this very same problem in complex medical and aviation systems. There are years where it feels like the system isn't going anywhere or making any progress, because all of the effort is in building that framework under the hood. Once that's in place, it seems to magically launch forward, with visible features being added very rapidly. It's a painful time for the developers, because they get a lot of heat for the 'lack of progress', and each time, we have to argue that things actually are moving forward. After several years, the business got used to that cycle.. but the public hasn't had this kind of visibility into complex software development.
I couldn't agree more. I think most players just don't understand programming in general so they don't understand the process. This is why most development studios DONT share anything until the product is ready for release (or at least close enough to release they think they can sell it).
Slow year or not, as someone who has kept up with Star Citizen news(via this channel) for years, but only started playing last month, there's so much more changes that happened earlier this year than I thought. I definitely think that starting to play this game during the end of the year is a far better experience than if I started during early 2023.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but for me, there were insanely many changes. I'm an Elite Dangerous 'refugee' and I haven't seen this much progress in the *entire* lifetime of ED, let alone in one year
I'm not sure I'd say 'slow' so much as 'low-key' because the progress seems to be behind the scenes. The real question is whether it speeds up because teams are coming back to SC or slows down as people get dragged back and forth for the sake of getting SQ42 out of the door. I'm excited for the (semi-invisible) tech side, the server stuff and the optimisations. And the promise of the Apollo might finally mean medical gameplay getting beyond the T0 placeholder...
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the release of the Cutter Scout/Rambler is a sign that we might FINALLY be about to get some form of T0 Exploration gameplay. They mentioned at CitizenCon that the new Starmap & the ability to record POIs would be the first step towards implementing that.
You will be massively disappointed because of how small the game’s maps actually are when server meshing comes in. Within a couple months there won’t be anything unique to find because someone somewhere has already seen it. These devs are the slowest developers in the industry. Very skilled but the slowest. Expect to be disappointed by the lack of on land gameplay for a long time.
@Desenrad exploration will have routines loops, finding wrecks, ore, bounties, bases,caves, etc marking and selling the paydata. Surveying as it were.
@@DesenradSelling data for high-value minerals is something that will require constant discovery; wrecks with valuable cargo will require vigilant scanning; finding unique or rare items is also something that has to be discovered with constant play. Exploration is based on emergent gameplay loops not simply finding some new location.
5:10 I'd like to correct some data on this. There are sand cave missions on both daymar and ita. THose are the investigations / missing person missions that bring you to caves. (not the missing crew member missions that give you more credits and are usually in ship wrekcs). So the missing persons in cave usually happen in the new sandcaves and their more grey-ish variants on other moons. The bounty (?RT) missions where you have to clear bandits nests, or find a specific bounty target in the cave, those bring you to the traditional (rocky) caves that existed for ages. I'm kind of a cave dweller so I've seen these missions around. It was true that when the sand caves were first introduced, there were no missions in them. But I think they came a major patch later.
As far as I'm concerned, until they release what they planned to release years ago, every year is a slow year. I don't understand how anyone can celebrate progress as slow as CIG's.
When you realize that it's making progress when building up a team from the start and essentially making a heavily modified engine, while building 2 games...it makes a lot more sense. Look how long GTA VI is taking. That's with a team, using the same engine, with less scope.
@@Cplblue Jesus christ, I've been here since the beginning and I'm so tired of hearing this excuse over and over for more than a decade. I used to love CIG and I forgave every delay but after a certain point, you have to accept that they time after time, they present something as coming soon and either deliver it late, delay it for years or forget about it altogether. If every CIG white knight could remove this particular nonsense arrow from their quiver I think we'd all get along more agreeably. To be clear: I no longer care about their trials and tribulations, I care about the product I expected roughly six years ago.
@@Cplblue Here's the thing, though...CIG has had to deal with some things during development, but they've also inflicted significant delays upon themselves and their supporters which when combined, far outstrip the unavoidable ones. They didn't have to continually rewrite the engine, they didn't have to engage in feature creep, they didn't have to build multiple studios across the world, they didn't have to split the games and teams apart. The game may have been smaller, but it would probably have been an actual game by now.
hey Morph. I'm stoked to build a PC at the end of 2024 with hopefully a 5000 series nvidia gpu and good monitor to fully appreciate what Star Citizen will become.
Make sure to have a MINIMUM of 34Gigs of RAM if you want to have any search engine open at the same time. Very helpful for pulling up trading routes or a video during travel.
@@americankid7782 current specs im looking to build and save up for this next year (2024) are as follows: 4k 240hz less than 1ms response time monitor 32 inches 5090 (Ti if available) Best Intel CPU at the time. (Might wait til early 2025 if a new one is on the horizon) 64 or 128 gigs of ddr5 1600 highest rated PSU High rated motherboard Whatever case that Gamers Nexus recommends at the time. Am I missing anything?
As I stated in your community poll, I don't think that it was a particularly slow year for SC. I think it felt quite slow because of how the features were distributed over the year, with 2 major patches in rather short succession at the first half and the other 2 major patches done within the same quarter at the end of the year, we had a long time in the middle of the year where it felt like nothing happened. Pair this with the amount of features for Arena Commander that were added in comparison to the PU and the year feels like it was a lot slower than it actually was.
I think it was "a tale of two years." The first half was agonizingly slow, without a doubt, for everyone. The second, came in and delivered in spades. Its for this reason, I think, that you can find such polarized opinions of the year as a whole. In addition, that slow first half is basically what caused the deficit of projected new accounts, even towards the end of the year. On the other hand, the big display of progress at the end of the year will pay dividends in the first half of 2024. Love the channel. Keep up the great content.
I came back to Star Citizen after having been away for a year, and I was absolutely blown away by the progress. Most importantly I could actually play the game now. Probably something you won't have noticed if you're playing on a top-tier system, but my 3070 can actually run the game with few framedrops now, whereas a year ago, every major city would be a powerpoint presentation. Adding content is relatively easy and quick, optimizing and fixing bugs on that content is where 90%+ of the work actually lies, and is ironically the least visible and at the same time most important aspect. The woes of gamedevelopment, in the period where you do the most intense and gruelling work, players will think you're not working at all. And when you take a break and have a bit of fun with new content they praise you for your hard work
04:13 - Ghost Hollow isn't broken? A few conditions have to be true to trigger it. Microtech comm array has to be down AND the broadcast tower next to the reclaimer on the ground has to be triggered before the atms will start
Still a lot of world building, placeholder, and base level features. Hopefully 2024 is the year we finally see Server Meshing, as all the progress suggests. Every year is a slow year for SC, as it's the nature of the project. Some folks equate 'uninteresting' with slowness, based on their own definitions and preference. Happy New Year, everyone!
The last few months have been very fast in reference to progress, so im confident that next year will have more updates much quicker. 2024 will be exciting!!
I don't think that the prediction of it being a slow year was entirely wrong, since a lot of the stuff we got this year was trickle down from S42, and stuff that had already been in the works/delayed, and most of it probably took a lot longer to be implemented because of the reallocation (honestly we might have even benefitted from them taking extra time. Also some of this stuff is from 2022, but w/e xD). As mentioned, the list was shorter than you think once you go through it - some of it was massive undertakings that felt little more than a bullet point, while other things felt like some of the most important updates to date. We haven't had performance upgrades like this in what feels like 6+ years (I'm not going to go check. Y'all can argue, but their telemetry site -when it's working- is not representative of most peoples real world performance, partially because most people don't submit data to it, partially because it's never working), and every time they do a performance pass it is to a very specific thing or place, and even then it usually breaks things and/or pushes minimum specs enough (usually because of poor optimization) that 99% of us don't feel much, if any, improvement. Likewise with the new locations - most of the time when we get a new location it's a river in the middle of nowhere, and while most of the ones from this year aren't much different, they are more focused on being a foundation for future content, rather than aesthetic (not to hate on river guy, we do need cool, interesting scenery!). While I'm obviously not in the spotlight like you, I also take a LOT of flak from the community over having a more realistic/grounded opinion (and for occasionally getting heated and calling people dumb over their wrong opinion xD), and speaking out about issues. People are always looking for the next witch hunt, as social creatures, drama is almost a necessity for a lot of people, an they are quick to brand any friction or criticism as descent, lies, and slander, or just use them to be vocal and try to make themselves look like the hero the community didn't need or ask for
As a person who casually supports and follows SC. I have to say that 2023 was not a slow year for me. The changes and work was more fun to follow, the interest in the work being done drew me back more often then in previous years.
It's my experience, when someone says, I'm not pessimistic I'm not negative, that's exactly what they are. At least you come of as such imo. Sure, I agree 2023 was a slow year, and I didn't expect anything else. I don't even expect much on live before expo. I do however like where the game is at rn. It feels great, it plays great. Features and tech introduced past 2 years have added much to the game imho. I hope the backbone tech will get implemented without to much issue. There are more then a few incoming features depending on that backbone for support. Best wishes for 2024 Morph
Just don't confuse being realistic with being pessimistic. I used to use a phrase, "hope for the best, but expect the worst" - that way, you're prepared either way.
your predictions for 2024 are almost the same as mine. I only suspect that server meshing will be in EVO at the end of the first quarter. Course they wont be able to say that, but thats when I think it will be in our hands. And then it will be in the tech preview channel second quarter, and I bet third quarter released. I also suspect that SQ42 is aiming for a christmas release. Since as far as videogames sales are concerned, thats one of the best times.
Systems always take a lot more time than something like adding gameplay items and it can be a trap some developers get caught in, just adding content after content but their systems in the back are unpolished and limiting and what they can do. I'm happy that SC is doing systems above gameplay but I was also a bit disappointed this year with what feeled like no progress
I've been a backer since 2015. And yeah, this was a slower year. But it's been picking up a lot of steam at the end of the year and next year looks to be a major recovery of what we lost in the previous year. The worst is still the 2017 through 2018 period where we went through a year with no major patches followed by 3.0 that broke everything for half a year. Now THAT was a downturn. But things are looking up going forward. Right now I'm feeling like 75% of what they've projected for Q1/Q2 will make it in during that time. And I still feel like that would be an accomplishment.
I have only been playing since 3.16 and only been watching the project for a few years before that, but to me 2023 didn't seem like a slow year at all.
Nice summary, you could add that - current salvaging is only a placeholder until they figure how to make it enjoyable. - mining rework done (rebalance) - ship respawn times have been increased (wtf for?) Nice summary anyway :) According to sq42 - who has an idea what "feature complete" may mean?
It was a slow but productive year, unlike most other games... rabbit vs tortoise story and I think 2024+ this game will just get better and better as long as it's healthy servers!
The problem with keeping/getting new players is that the game is still massively buggy. I been playing since 2014 so for me i seen it all and been through it and really know what to expect. For new players it will just cause frustration with the amount of issues. If new players ask me is it good, at the moment i would say wait another 6 months at least then ask me again. We really need Server Meshing, Rep layer, new HUD/UI/Starmap, and some major fixes before i can recommend SC to newbies. Dont get me wrong I absolutely love the game (bestest space game ever) even in its current state. But I cant recommend it to new players, or returning players that have not played in a long time at the moment.
It will be buggy with those implementations as well. They are not bug fixes. I would recommend the game with the caveat that they need to accept lots of annoying bugs. Otherwise it's a big no.
I tried out Star Citizen back around when Orison came out - patches 3.13 and 3.14. I haven't played since then. (I'm playing other games which I find more compatible with my playstyle.) During my limited play time, I found many features of the game to be positive and many to be negative. I do hope they release server meshing, Pyro, and Squadron 42 in this next year but I understand past history impeaches this optimism, somewhat. I will definitely check out Squadron 42 (I paid for it in my starter pack, after all. Not sure whether they will require more of me when it comes out.) With regard to the rest of the game, my greatest worry is that critical tech, when released, falls flat in functionality at-scale and that it's repair or re-iteration causes more than a year of delay. My second greatest worry is that Star Citizen, once a majority of the critical tech becomes functional, becomes more of a tech demo and less of a cohesive game which is actually fun to play for the average 'casual' player. The challenge with having so many interconnected features in a multi-player game is that gamers are extremely good at finding unintended advantages within systems, often at the expense of others.
A fun thought but something I would never expect to be implemented and would probably create controversy, is adding different playable races in the game for your character. Obviously has been many times over in other MMO's and may not be aligned with the star citizen vision, but a cool thought nonetheless.
"prob ably won't notice much difference from a year ago"... It's a really significantly different game from a year ago. So many things you call out as "not impactful" have created so much more stuff to do, as evidenced by watching any of the content creators who actually play the game. And discounting just how much has changed with the game over the last year when the vast majority of CIG's efforts had been put onto SQ42 is an amazing leap of logic.
I think 2024 is going to be another "foundation" year for SC. There's a lot of tech still needs to be stabilized & then further deployments. My best hope is that we see some of these fundamentals hit our client & start to get dialed in before the end of '24. But I don't expect the game will feel dramatically different - no massive new server caps, no flood of content. The stuff that works now will be improved into a decent experience, there will be some content drops - enough to keep the game relevant for current players, maintain interest for backers who are following along & continue to slowly grow the player base. There's not going to be any watershed moments for SC, even server meshing when it is introduced. One day it'll simply be a good game and that time will come at different points for different players. It's already there for a lot of people, for others it is years away.
2023 has been a slower year for Star Citizen. But I think the slowness was drastically exagerated at the beginning of the year. Like it was slow it just was not as slow as you made it out to be in the beginning.
I feel that they should add some sort of passive money generation. If it is taking over a POI, or renting out ships (to npc's), I feel it could help the people who can't play hours a day.
I really look forward to a ship sharing org tool, where you can set permissions for certain ranks or individuals in the org to have access to your ship or fleet.
What do you mean ghost hollow is broken. it's been great, made lots of money from it. tons of NPCs come with Cutlass ships over time. Also I think your characterization of the state/usefulness of entity persistance is way short sighted. You should watch the video released recently by SuperMacBrother called "Star Citizen is on ANOTHER LEVEL!!" to see how just one of many citizens in the verse are experiancing and enjoying the benefits of entity persistance. So long as you choose the same geographical region youll always go to the same shard unless its full or has died, and in my experiance shards are full when they are created, and then they hugely deflate in player numbers over a day and remain close to 50% full or less for their lifespan, meaning people generally always come back to the same server. Joining on friends, or partying up with others negates this though.
I wouldnt call 2023 a slow year when PES, Salvage were released and we got to test a limited version of Pyro and the replication layer. Some quarters were very slow and disrupting (3.18 and 3.9) but overall 2023 proved to be a great year. In the end, I dont think you need to justify yourself for a prediction at the beginning of 2023 that you supported with valid arguments. Some people will feel you were wrong, others that you were right. All that matters is that you are a great content creator. BTW the funding data example in this video felt a bit deceiving
You always deserve a like being thrown on your content, controversial or not. The (by far) most controversial thing for me was the introduction of Microwave Salvage (I am NOT calling it "Structural Salvage") About the nicest thing was the intro of legit settlements, where you ain't (or do not have to) killing the occupants just to look around.
Very excited for this next year if they actually deliver on bringing most if not all of what we saw at CitCon! The new starmap, ship MFDs, and inventory UI are some of my favorites.
Great video, with one caveat. The amount of time, effort, learning, and monotony that goes into making hair for characters is monumental. And I can hear my fellow character artists screaming inside hearing you diminish the work involved. It's not gonna take a large team like major features, no, but a team spent a lot more time developing that hair than you might realize.
When you say removing components has no value, I assume you mean more that it has too low a value? You can easily make an extra 30k from grabbing some power plants from certain ships. It’s not a ton, but for a super new player learning bounties etc… every little bit definitely helps
That day when you fly into New Babbage and they mark your hangar as promised will be the day you know we are near to a finished game... but it has become much more fun lately.
My prediction: The jump gates will be just as inoperable in 2024 as they were this year and were only a "wallet lubricant" released in tandem with the sale of the F8 and lead up to CitizenCon and more wallet lubricant in the form of their engine demo which laughably showed no tree pop-in on microTech and y'all swallowed that thing deeper than even CIG thought you would. Y'all took it so deep Chris cried.
Great video. I don’t think you mentioned the mining refactor, ui update and balance passes though. Also the Drake Vulture was added in game. I’m cautiously optimistic for 2024. If we only get the stuff Jarred was talking about in 2024 it will be a great year.
I think its only natural that there is a declining trend in terms of new players joining SC, there will be a saturation point. I think between the long development time and sceptisim over wither it will be released (warneted or not) we are now starting to see this trend take place. Thankfully I do think CIG recognised this a few years ago, with them pushing SQ42 and now it being feature complete, it will give the project that adernalin shot it will need to keep going.
I predict that SQ42 release date gets announced around Invictus (to align with lore… it’s a recruitment event) with actual release being around Oct/Nov to align with CitCon/IAE and the holiday season
People treated CitCon like it was the justification they were looking for to prove that this really was the year of Star Citizen. It felt bad having to remind them that this was really just more "not" promises and dubious deadlines.
I have to say, as far as gameplay loops go physicalized cargo has really transformed how high level bounties play. They’re a ton of fun to do in groups of 3-4 players, unless you have to get boxes out of a carrack. I hate carracks now.
This video is going to be all the more impressive with the context of development accelerating from here because the SQ42 devs are finally coming to work on Star Citizen.
i've also taken a year long hiatus except for touring the tech preview channel, and i'm very confident 2024 is going to be full of fun, but until server performance is better i don't see the point in going elbow deep into this game and investing time and patience in it
The loss of Port Olisar makes me realise how hand crafted content and interiors for stations are really important: or just better modular design than the existing. Seraphim is boring and generic, the exteriors might all look different, but it was a big disappointment.
2023 was a big year for back end tech but not for game play. It was a foundational year. 2024 and 2025 will be HUGE years for Game play. When SQ42 goes live and if it is good, the number of people playing SC is going to Jump exponentially. The money they bring in because of SQ42 will be 2 or 3 time more than what they have razed for the game from the start. I think SC goes to beta in early to mid 2025 and then goes to release in 2026 at Cit con. The game will be in a place that new contents is just new content not new tech.
Speaking of org features... What's going on with in game chat? Some of these ships are designed to have a lot of people. Do they prefer we use discord? I don't want to be in a channel with 30 people at once personally. Would be nice to see command comms, proximity comms and squad comms. Other games use this for large groups but SC struggles right now with comms working at all lol.
Great run down, feels like a busy year but bust patches tarnish it. Looking forward to accelerated progress for 2024. Base building will be something I’m most looking forward to.
After Starfield, CIG have got so much goodwill back from the community coming back appreciating what they’re doing and the vision all the more. With the PU in its most stable, playable and best state in over a year, I’m actually enjoying playing again for the first time since 3.17.2 (the subsequent patches had no new content and it got incredibly boring). 2024 has the potential to be Star Citizen’s best year ever, and set them up for a late 2025 release of Squadron 42.
Not from this puppy. Perhaps some people have goodwill, but I've been backing this game for ten years, and it has what.. THREE planets? THREE? Are they better than SF's? Sure. But SC has soooooo far to go before it's "feature complete" like SQ42. Probably another 5 years, at least. And I imagine any "goodwill from Starfield" will dry up as soon as SQ42 is pushed off until some time in 2025.
I agree with you, Morph. I think 2023 was a slow year. I barely logged on at all this year. PES is exciting tech for what it means in the long term, but by itself it's not super interesting. Salvage is fun and I have played a bit in Q4 now that Structural Salvage is in, but that by itself isn't enough to make me a full time player. I need Server Meshing and more improvements before I'm ready to make this my main game.
We need a ship that allows us to paint other ships. You'll need to buy RGB and mix accordingly. Let us do our own paints. I would buy a ship that can do it! Spread the word!
I am really looking forward for 2024. If just 70% of the content announced by Jared for the first half will be released as intended, it will still probably be the most exciting phase of development so far.
I really hope that next year will be CIG’s best year but I expect server meshing to break the PU and break a lot of those 12 month promises made during this last Citizen Con.
I love Star Citizen, but it's sad how much they 'release' that is utterly broken. Like there's so much roadmap, and time spent on ships being developed to be released years from now...but ground vehicles are utter dog crap. Cut back on all the planning, and for *_ucks sake, finish something.
if we get all the UI features shown at con and server meshing leads to PES being actually able to work then 2024 will be SCs year, the rest wont really effect how you play as much. The UI stuff will make it an actual game that people want to play without rage quitting and if PES worked we could all live out our immersion dream of living on our ships and hiding a space base in deep space or an asteroid base somewhere, hell if PES actually worked then we could at least decorate our ships somewhat
I still don't play yet...I need a computer that will have a hope of running such a game. They could do more to motivate me. There's little sense of urgency with it still being in alpha and buggy. The longer I wait the closer they'll be to final necessary specs and the more advanced gaming computers get.
"How much more wasted money they would have had if they focused on multiplayer" 🙄 I'll reinstall it to play the single player game, whatever decade that gets released in, then uninstalling right after because the devs are intentionally making the multiplayer a HUGE waste of time instead of designing for fun. They don't deserve our money since we made their company even happen and haven't gotten the promised game in far too long.
For me 2023 was a slow year, and i hope CIG will fulfill the promisses of citcon, but i'm realist so if they give us only half of the features i'm fine with it.
I do think major bug fixes should be mentioned more. The devs don’t just add fancy new things, they work their ass off to remove really annoying bugs, which are so nice to be gone. :) morph I love your videos, thanks!
As a software dev, bug fixes often take much longer than new features (the smaller ones at least). They are a massive pain in the butt to find, often fixing one unveils another!
That’s the top thing they did this year: comparing 3.18 to 3.22 is night and day and has required enormous amounts of hard work to reach such a good live experience and state. Credit to the devs and testers.
chop chop morpho boy
@@UselessnoobcowThis. A lot of times the bugs aren't even associated with the thing they affect. It could be a graphics bug that causes a physics bug to completely flip out, and finding the cause of it can sometimes drive somebody crazy. I used to hate having to scour through lines of code to find what was actually causing bugs, because it was never what was expected.
It is in fact why open development takes such more more time than closed development.
I think the reason for the difference in opinion about the progress is how you're measuring progress. Coming from a software architecture and systems engineering background, the progress this year was tremendous. In my opinion, it has moved from a demo and prototype into an actual alpha; that is it has the framework in PES to actually perform as a proper persistent game. Something it was lacking before, and meant the software infrastructure would never have been publishable. You can't rely justify a code base that can't ever do its job as an 'alpha' build. This is sort of the line between prototypes of systems cobbled together, and a production backbone that you're building features on to.
Sure, from a player perspective, who's looking at this as nothing more than a game, it seems light. But that's not where we're at. This was moving from a set of features stuck together to a finally integrated infrastructure. That's why PES was so painful.. it was a huge transition and progress leap forward. Once we get server meshing in and things stabilized a little, the team can focus whole heartedly on all the player-facing work that you would see as progress.
And I'm coming at this from over a decade and a half of this very same problem in complex medical and aviation systems. There are years where it feels like the system isn't going anywhere or making any progress, because all of the effort is in building that framework under the hood. Once that's in place, it seems to magically launch forward, with visible features being added very rapidly. It's a painful time for the developers, because they get a lot of heat for the 'lack of progress', and each time, we have to argue that things actually are moving forward. After several years, the business got used to that cycle.. but the public hasn't had this kind of visibility into complex software development.
....only took 11 years
Who did it faster?.. and are they on life support - or already dead?@@yankee891
Thanks for your sharing your perspective.
I couldn't agree more. I think most players just don't understand programming in general so they don't understand the process. This is why most development studios DONT share anything until the product is ready for release (or at least close enough to release they think they can sell it).
3+ decades here, and I concur 100%.
I think the progress is significant. The improvement in stability and 30K recovery really shows the progress they've made.
Slow year or not, as someone who has kept up with Star Citizen news(via this channel) for years, but only started playing last month, there's so much more changes that happened earlier this year than I thought. I definitely think that starting to play this game during the end of the year is a far better experience than if I started during early 2023.
Call me a hopeless optimist, but for me, there were insanely many changes. I'm an Elite Dangerous 'refugee' and I haven't seen this much progress in the *entire* lifetime of ED, let alone in one year
I'm not sure I'd say 'slow' so much as 'low-key' because the progress seems to be behind the scenes. The real question is whether it speeds up because teams are coming back to SC or slows down as people get dragged back and forth for the sake of getting SQ42 out of the door. I'm excited for the (semi-invisible) tech side, the server stuff and the optimisations. And the promise of the Apollo might finally mean medical gameplay getting beyond the T0 placeholder...
I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the release of the Cutter Scout/Rambler is a sign that we might FINALLY be about to get some form of T0 Exploration gameplay. They mentioned at CitizenCon that the new Starmap & the ability to record POIs would be the first step towards implementing that.
You will be massively disappointed because of how small the game’s maps actually are when server meshing comes in. Within a couple months there won’t be anything unique to find because someone somewhere has already seen it. These devs are the slowest developers in the industry. Very skilled but the slowest. Expect to be disappointed by the lack of on land gameplay for a long time.
@@Desenrad you dont know Mojang xdxd
@Desenrad exploration will have routines loops, finding wrecks, ore, bounties, bases,caves, etc marking and selling the paydata. Surveying as it were.
@@DesenradSelling data for high-value minerals is something that will require constant discovery; wrecks with valuable cargo will require vigilant scanning; finding unique or rare items is also something that has to be discovered with constant play. Exploration is based on emergent gameplay loops not simply finding some new location.
5:10 I'd like to correct some data on this. There are sand cave missions on both daymar and ita. THose are the investigations / missing person missions that bring you to caves. (not the missing crew member missions that give you more credits and are usually in ship wrekcs).
So the missing persons in cave usually happen in the new sandcaves and their more grey-ish variants on other moons. The bounty (?RT) missions where you have to clear bandits nests, or find a specific bounty target in the cave, those bring you to the traditional (rocky) caves that existed for ages.
I'm kind of a cave dweller so I've seen these missions around. It was true that when the sand caves were first introduced, there were no missions in them. But I think they came a major patch later.
As far as I'm concerned, until they release what they planned to release years ago, every year is a slow year. I don't understand how anyone can celebrate progress as slow as CIG's.
When you realize that it's making progress when building up a team from the start and essentially making a heavily modified engine, while building 2 games...it makes a lot more sense. Look how long GTA VI is taking. That's with a team, using the same engine, with less scope.
@@Cplblue Jesus christ, I've been here since the beginning and I'm so tired of hearing this excuse over and over for more than a decade. I used to love CIG and I forgave every delay but after a certain point, you have to accept that they time after time, they present something as coming soon and either deliver it late, delay it for years or forget about it altogether. If every CIG white knight could remove this particular nonsense arrow from their quiver I think we'd all get along more agreeably.
To be clear: I no longer care about their trials and tribulations, I care about the product I expected roughly six years ago.
@@disky01 yeah, I've been a backer since early 2013. I've been waiting forever too. It doesn't change the fact of what I said.
@@Cplblue Here's the thing, though...CIG has had to deal with some things during development, but they've also inflicted significant delays upon themselves and their supporters which when combined, far outstrip the unavoidable ones. They didn't have to continually rewrite the engine, they didn't have to engage in feature creep, they didn't have to build multiple studios across the world, they didn't have to split the games and teams apart. The game may have been smaller, but it would probably have been an actual game by now.
hey Morph. I'm stoked to build a PC at the end of 2024 with hopefully a 5000 series nvidia gpu and good monitor to fully appreciate what Star Citizen will become.
You will love and hate the game even more
Make sure to have a MINIMUM of 34Gigs of RAM if you want to have any search engine open at the same time.
Very helpful for pulling up trading routes or a video during travel.
Get the PC first, tell me how much you will appreciate SC, Afterwards 😊
@@americankid7782 current specs im looking to build and save up for this next year (2024) are as follows:
4k 240hz less than 1ms response time monitor 32 inches
5090 (Ti if available)
Best Intel CPU at the time. (Might wait til early 2025 if a new one is on the horizon)
64 or 128 gigs of ddr5
1600 highest rated PSU
High rated motherboard
Whatever case that Gamers Nexus recommends at the time.
Am I missing anything?
I said something similar 10 years ago.
Great summary and loved to hear about your expectations for the year ahead - Happy New Year when it arrives! Like you, I'm feeling hopeful for 2024
As I stated in your community poll, I don't think that it was a particularly slow year for SC.
I think it felt quite slow because of how the features were distributed over the year, with 2 major patches in rather short succession at the first half and the other 2 major patches done within the same quarter at the end of the year, we had a long time in the middle of the year where it felt like nothing happened. Pair this with the amount of features for Arena Commander that were added in comparison to the PU and the year feels like it was a lot slower than it actually was.
I think it was "a tale of two years." The first half was agonizingly slow, without a doubt, for everyone. The second, came in and delivered in spades. Its for this reason, I think, that you can find such polarized opinions of the year as a whole. In addition, that slow first half is basically what caused the deficit of projected new accounts, even towards the end of the year. On the other hand, the big display of progress at the end of the year will pay dividends in the first half of 2024.
Love the channel. Keep up the great content.
I came back to Star Citizen after having been away for a year, and I was absolutely blown away by the progress. Most importantly I could actually play the game now. Probably something you won't have noticed if you're playing on a top-tier system, but my 3070 can actually run the game with few framedrops now, whereas a year ago, every major city would be a powerpoint presentation.
Adding content is relatively easy and quick, optimizing and fixing bugs on that content is where 90%+ of the work actually lies, and is ironically the least visible and at the same time most important aspect. The woes of gamedevelopment, in the period where you do the most intense and gruelling work, players will think you're not working at all. And when you take a break and have a bit of fun with new content they praise you for your hard work
04:13 - Ghost Hollow isn't broken? A few conditions have to be true to trigger it. Microtech comm array has to be down AND the broadcast tower next to the reclaimer on the ground has to be triggered before the atms will start
Still a lot of world building, placeholder, and base level features. Hopefully 2024 is the year we finally see Server Meshing, as all the progress suggests. Every year is a slow year for SC, as it's the nature of the project. Some folks equate 'uninteresting' with slowness, based on their own definitions and preference. Happy New Year, everyone!
The last few months have been very fast in reference to progress, so im confident that next year will have more updates much quicker. 2024 will be exciting!!
I don't think that the prediction of it being a slow year was entirely wrong, since a lot of the stuff we got this year was trickle down from S42, and stuff that had already been in the works/delayed, and most of it probably took a lot longer to be implemented because of the reallocation (honestly we might have even benefitted from them taking extra time. Also some of this stuff is from 2022, but w/e xD).
As mentioned, the list was shorter than you think once you go through it - some of it was massive undertakings that felt little more than a bullet point, while other things felt like some of the most important updates to date. We haven't had performance upgrades like this in what feels like 6+ years (I'm not going to go check. Y'all can argue, but their telemetry site -when it's working- is not representative of most peoples real world performance, partially because most people don't submit data to it, partially because it's never working), and every time they do a performance pass it is to a very specific thing or place, and even then it usually breaks things and/or pushes minimum specs enough (usually because of poor optimization) that 99% of us don't feel much, if any, improvement.
Likewise with the new locations - most of the time when we get a new location it's a river in the middle of nowhere, and while most of the ones from this year aren't much different, they are more focused on being a foundation for future content, rather than aesthetic (not to hate on river guy, we do need cool, interesting scenery!).
While I'm obviously not in the spotlight like you, I also take a LOT of flak from the community over having a more realistic/grounded opinion (and for occasionally getting heated and calling people dumb over their wrong opinion xD), and speaking out about issues. People are always looking for the next witch hunt, as social creatures, drama is almost a necessity for a lot of people, an they are quick to brand any friction or criticism as descent, lies, and slander, or just use them to be vocal and try to make themselves look like the hero the community didn't need or ask for
As a person who casually supports and follows SC. I have to say that 2023 was not a slow year for me. The changes and work was more fun to follow, the interest in the work being done drew me back more often then in previous years.
It's my experience, when someone says, I'm not pessimistic I'm not negative, that's exactly what they are. At least you come of as such imo.
Sure, I agree 2023 was a slow year, and I didn't expect anything else. I don't even expect much on live before expo.
I do however like where the game is at rn. It feels great, it plays great. Features and tech introduced past 2 years have added much to the game imho.
I hope the backbone tech will get implemented without to much issue. There are more then a few incoming features depending on that backbone for support.
Best wishes for 2024 Morph
Just don't confuse being realistic with being pessimistic. I used to use a phrase, "hope for the best, but expect the worst" - that way, you're prepared either way.
your predictions for 2024 are almost the same as mine. I only suspect that server meshing will be in EVO at the end of the first quarter. Course they wont be able to say that, but thats when I think it will be in our hands. And then it will be in the tech preview channel second quarter, and I bet third quarter released. I also suspect that SQ42 is aiming for a christmas release. Since as far as videogames sales are concerned, thats one of the best times.
Systems always take a lot more time than something like adding gameplay items and it can be a trap some developers get caught in, just adding content after content but their systems in the back are unpolished and limiting and what they can do. I'm happy that SC is doing systems above gameplay but I was also a bit disappointed this year with what feeled like no progress
Progress on this game always seems glacial to me. Nice video and summary, and +1 for the widescreen support - love it.
I've been a backer since 2015. And yeah, this was a slower year. But it's been picking up a lot of steam at the end of the year and next year looks to be a major recovery of what we lost in the previous year. The worst is still the 2017 through 2018 period where we went through a year with no major patches followed by 3.0 that broke everything for half a year. Now THAT was a downturn.
But things are looking up going forward. Right now I'm feeling like 75% of what they've projected for Q1/Q2 will make it in during that time. And I still feel like that would be an accomplishment.
I have only been playing since 3.16 and only been watching the project for a few years before that, but to me 2023 didn't seem like a slow year at all.
Same here. Felt like Star Citizen's development was the only truly noteworthy thing hapepning in the year.
Nice summary, you could add that
- current salvaging is only a placeholder until they figure how to make it enjoyable.
- mining rework done (rebalance)
- ship respawn times have been increased (wtf for?)
Nice summary anyway :)
According to sq42 - who has an idea what "feature complete" may mean?
It was a slow but productive year, unlike most other games... rabbit vs tortoise story and I think 2024+ this game will just get better and better as long as it's healthy servers!
One of the new outposts has a river and lake you can jump to
The problem with keeping/getting new players is that the game is still massively buggy. I been playing since 2014 so for me i seen it all and been through it and really know what to expect. For new players it will just cause frustration with the amount of issues. If new players ask me is it good, at the moment i would say wait another 6 months at least then ask me again. We really need Server Meshing, Rep layer, new HUD/UI/Starmap, and some major fixes before i can recommend SC to newbies.
Dont get me wrong I absolutely love the game (bestest space game ever) even in its current state. But I cant recommend it to new players, or returning players that have not played in a long time at the moment.
It will be buggy with those implementations as well. They are not bug fixes. I would recommend the game with the caveat that they need to accept lots of annoying bugs. Otherwise it's a big no.
@@latjolajban81 but will be a lot more tolerable
I tried out Star Citizen back around when Orison came out - patches 3.13 and 3.14. I haven't played since then. (I'm playing other games which I find more compatible with my playstyle.)
During my limited play time, I found many features of the game to be positive and many to be negative.
I do hope they release server meshing, Pyro, and Squadron 42 in this next year but I understand past history impeaches this optimism, somewhat.
I will definitely check out Squadron 42 (I paid for it in my starter pack, after all. Not sure whether they will require more of me when it comes out.)
With regard to the rest of the game, my greatest worry is that critical tech, when released, falls flat in functionality at-scale and that it's repair or re-iteration causes more than a year of delay.
My second greatest worry is that Star Citizen, once a majority of the critical tech becomes functional, becomes more of a tech demo and less of a cohesive game which is actually fun to play for the average 'casual' player. The challenge with having so many interconnected features in a multi-player game is that gamers are extremely good at finding unintended advantages within systems, often at the expense of others.
A fun thought but something I would never expect to be implemented and would probably create controversy, is adding different playable races in the game for your character. Obviously has been many times over in other MMO's and may not be aligned with the star citizen vision, but a cool thought nonetheless.
"prob ably won't notice much difference from a year ago"...
It's a really significantly different game from a year ago. So many things you call out as "not impactful" have created so much more stuff to do, as evidenced by watching any of the content creators who actually play the game. And discounting just how much has changed with the game over the last year when the vast majority of CIG's efforts had been put onto SQ42 is an amazing leap of logic.
I think 2024 is going to be another "foundation" year for SC. There's a lot of tech still needs to be stabilized & then further deployments.
My best hope is that we see some of these fundamentals hit our client & start to get dialed in before the end of '24.
But I don't expect the game will feel dramatically different - no massive new server caps, no flood of content.
The stuff that works now will be improved into a decent experience, there will be some content drops - enough to keep the game relevant for current players, maintain interest for backers who are following along & continue to slowly grow the player base.
There's not going to be any watershed moments for SC, even server meshing when it is introduced. One day it'll simply be a good game and that time will come at different points for different players. It's already there for a lot of people, for others it is years away.
2023 has been a slower year for Star Citizen. But I think the slowness was drastically exagerated at the beginning of the year. Like it was slow it just was not as slow as you made it out to be in the beginning.
There actually are some missions in the sand caves, the find missing person missions are in them
I feel that they should add some sort of passive money generation. If it is taking over a POI, or renting out ships (to npc's), I feel it could help the people who can't play hours a day.
I really look forward to a ship sharing org tool, where you can set permissions for certain ranks or individuals in the org to have access to your ship or fleet.
What do you mean ghost hollow is broken. it's been great, made lots of money from it. tons of NPCs come with Cutlass ships over time.
Also I think your characterization of the state/usefulness of entity persistance is way short sighted. You should watch the video released recently by SuperMacBrother called "Star Citizen is on ANOTHER LEVEL!!" to see how just one of many citizens in the verse are experiancing and enjoying the benefits of entity persistance. So long as you choose the same geographical region youll always go to the same shard unless its full or has died, and in my experiance shards are full when they are created, and then they hugely deflate in player numbers over a day and remain close to 50% full or less for their lifespan, meaning people generally always come back to the same server. Joining on friends, or partying up with others negates this though.
I wouldnt call 2023 a slow year when PES, Salvage were released and we got to test a limited version of Pyro and the replication layer. Some quarters were very slow and disrupting (3.18 and 3.9) but overall 2023 proved to be a great year. In the end, I dont think you need to justify yourself for a prediction at the beginning of 2023 that you supported with valid arguments. Some people will feel you were wrong, others that you were right. All that matters is that you are a great content creator.
BTW the funding data example in this video felt a bit deceiving
I don't even read the titles of these videos I see "New Video" and Morphologis's icon and I just click knowing its going to be a good video.
You always deserve a like being thrown on your content, controversial or not. The (by far) most controversial thing for me was the introduction of Microwave Salvage (I am NOT calling it "Structural Salvage") About the nicest thing was the intro of legit settlements, where you ain't (or do not have to) killing the occupants just to look around.
*_Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2024!_** :D*
Excited for 2024!, Happy new years everybody!
Thanks Morph for this video, beautifully done once again. Happy New Year and thanks for not giving up on the community !
Anytime I get fatigued from programming I watch a star citizen video and I get motivated all over again.
Very excited for this next year if they actually deliver on bringing most if not all of what we saw at CitCon! The new starmap, ship MFDs, and inventory UI are some of my favorites.
Great video, with one caveat. The amount of time, effort, learning, and monotony that goes into making hair for characters is monumental. And I can hear my fellow character artists screaming inside hearing you diminish the work involved. It's not gonna take a large team like major features, no, but a team spent a lot more time developing that hair than you might realize.
I agree with Morph. Most features are still surprisingly half-assed and broken. They need so long to think things through
When you say removing components has no value, I assume you mean more that it has too low a value? You can easily make an extra 30k from grabbing some power plants from certain ships. It’s not a ton, but for a super new player learning bounties etc… every little bit definitely helps
That day when you fly into New Babbage and they mark your hangar as promised will be the day you know we are near to a finished game... but it has become much more fun lately.
Does the game support controller use? Or only just mouse and keyboard? Thanks.
Flight stick(s), Controller, Mouse and keyboard, whatever item or combo of items you think would be your perfect set up
Spot on, Morph! Yes, it was a slow year. And did you have a cold?? Get better, dude!
this year was relatively slow, but by the end there's been so much packed into it
My prediction: The jump gates will be just as inoperable in 2024 as they were this year and were only a "wallet lubricant" released in tandem with the sale of the F8 and lead up to CitizenCon and more wallet lubricant in the form of their engine demo which laughably showed no tree pop-in on microTech and y'all swallowed that thing deeper than even CIG thought you would.
Y'all took it so deep Chris cried.
Is there 3rd person view or first person only?
2024 is gonna be a great year 👍
Great video. I don’t think you mentioned the mining refactor, ui update and balance passes though. Also the Drake Vulture was added in game.
I’m cautiously optimistic for 2024. If we only get the stuff Jarred was talking about in 2024 it will be a great year.
I'm ready for some base building!
I do wish AC multi-crew was larger than 4 total players per side but I imagine this is just a test.
I think its only natural that there is a declining trend in terms of new players joining SC, there will be a saturation point. I think between the long development time and sceptisim over wither it will be released (warneted or not) we are now starting to see this trend take place. Thankfully I do think CIG recognised this a few years ago, with them pushing SQ42 and now it being feature complete, it will give the project that adernalin shot it will need to keep going.
There is almost 0 interest in this game due to the ridiculous prices and lack of content.
I predict that SQ42 release date gets announced around Invictus (to align with lore… it’s a recruitment event) with actual release being around Oct/Nov to align with CitCon/IAE and the holiday season
People treated CitCon like it was the justification they were looking for to prove that this really was the year of Star Citizen. It felt bad having to remind them that this was really just more "not" promises and dubious deadlines.
I have to say, as far as gameplay loops go physicalized cargo has really transformed how high level bounties play. They’re a ton of fun to do in groups of 3-4 players, unless you have to get boxes out of a carrack. I hate carracks now.
This video is going to be all the more impressive with the context of development accelerating from here because the SQ42 devs are finally coming to work on Star Citizen.
Thanks fir the videos throughout 2023, and all the best for 2024.
i've also taken a year long hiatus except for touring the tech preview channel, and i'm very confident 2024 is going to be full of fun, but until server performance is better i don't see the point in going elbow deep into this game and investing time and patience in it
The loss of Port Olisar makes me realise how hand crafted content and interiors for stations are really important: or just better modular design than the existing. Seraphim is boring and generic, the exteriors might all look different, but it was a big disappointment.
where's the review for the Santokyai Morph? I was wating for more than a week now
Hey Morph. Recently upgrade PC and the game being on sale, very stoked to buy it soon. Is this game playable on controller?
Exciting prospects!
Kinda impressive he got both of the featured derelict settlements wrong, actually showed cutter's rig and astor's clearing
What about a release date?
2023 was a big year for back end tech but not for game play. It was a foundational year. 2024 and 2025 will be HUGE years for Game play.
When SQ42 goes live and if it is good, the number of people playing SC is going to Jump exponentially. The money they bring in because of SQ42 will be 2 or 3 time more than what they have razed for the game from the start.
I think SC goes to beta in early to mid 2025 and then goes to release in 2026 at Cit con. The game will be in a place that new contents is just new content not new tech.
Happy New Year
Love ya Morph!! Happy New Years!
Happy New Year Morph! Best content creator we have.
Speaking of org features... What's going on with in game chat? Some of these ships are designed to have a lot of people. Do they prefer we use discord? I don't want to be in a channel with 30 people at once personally. Would be nice to see command comms, proximity comms and squad comms. Other games use this for large groups but SC struggles right now with comms working at all lol.
Great run down, feels like a busy year but bust patches tarnish it. Looking forward to accelerated progress for 2024. Base building will be something I’m most looking forward to.
After Starfield, CIG have got so much goodwill back from the community coming back appreciating what they’re doing and the vision all the more. With the PU in its most stable, playable and best state in over a year, I’m actually enjoying playing again for the first time since 3.17.2 (the subsequent patches had no new content and it got incredibly boring). 2024 has the potential to be Star Citizen’s best year ever, and set them up for a late 2025 release of Squadron 42.
Not from this puppy. Perhaps some people have goodwill, but I've been backing this game for ten years, and it has what.. THREE planets? THREE? Are they better than SF's? Sure. But SC has soooooo far to go before it's "feature complete" like SQ42. Probably another 5 years, at least. And I imagine any "goodwill from Starfield" will dry up as soon as SQ42 is pushed off until some time in 2025.
I agree with you, Morph. I think 2023 was a slow year. I barely logged on at all this year. PES is exciting tech for what it means in the long term, but by itself it's not super interesting. Salvage is fun and I have played a bit in Q4 now that Structural Salvage is in, but that by itself isn't enough to make me a full time player. I need Server Meshing and more improvements before I'm ready to make this my main game.
for weapons you missed the deadrige shotgun
Buyable loot boxes are easily in my top 3
Happy new year fellow citizens ♥️
Frankly the whole "We aren't going to release vehicles missing gameplay features" only applies to the BMM as an excuse to push it back
We need a ship that allows us to paint other ships. You'll need to buy RGB and mix accordingly. Let us do our own paints. I would buy a ship that can do it! Spread the word!
What we need is a performance update.
All tanks need antigravs instead of threads at this point tbh.
I am really looking forward for 2024. If just 70% of the content announced by Jared for the first half will be released as intended, it will still probably be the most exciting phase of development so far.
Really hope the rangers release in 2024 along with the reworked ground vehicle physics
I really hope that next year will be CIG’s best year but I expect server meshing to break the PU and break a lot of those 12 month promises made during this last Citizen Con.
I love Star Citizen, but it's sad how much they 'release' that is utterly broken. Like there's so much roadmap, and time spent on ships being developed to be released years from now...but ground vehicles are utter dog crap.
Cut back on all the planning, and for *_ucks sake, finish something.
Let’s face it it’s really down to who gets base building right .. whoever does that is going to be the leader of space Sims
if we get all the UI features shown at con and server meshing leads to PES being actually able to work then 2024 will be SCs year, the rest wont really effect how you play as much. The UI stuff will make it an actual game that people want to play without rage quitting and if PES worked we could all live out our immersion dream of living on our ships and hiding a space base in deep space or an asteroid base somewhere, hell if PES actually worked then we could at least decorate our ships somewhat
Yesss, ultrawide lets goo :D
best feature by far is blowing up for no reason
I still don't play yet...I need a computer that will have a hope of running such a game.
They could do more to motivate me. There's little sense of urgency with it still being in alpha and buggy.
The longer I wait the closer they'll be to final necessary specs and the more advanced gaming computers get.
I still miss Levski and that ATC guy :(
"Be good!"
"How much more wasted money they would have had if they focused on multiplayer" 🙄
I'll reinstall it to play the single player game, whatever decade that gets released in, then uninstalling right after because the devs are intentionally making the multiplayer a HUGE waste of time instead of designing for fun. They don't deserve our money since we made their company even happen and haven't gotten the promised game in far too long.
For me 2023 was a slow year, and i hope CIG will fulfill the promisses of citcon, but i'm realist so if they give us only half of the features i'm fine with it.
Happy Holidays! :)