I feel for game devs. I really do. Despite what armchair pundits will claim, game dev is hard, man. It’s not like what I do, web app development, so I wouldn’t comment on what game devs do by saying “I’m a developer, too!”. There are so many more moving parts to making a video game, a much wider scope, and a significantly longer incubation period during which everything that’s already been done should not change if at all possible. It’s spinning plates while chopping onions. It’s herding cats while on a tightrope. It’s other whimsical and disparate comparisons. You get the drift.

None of that makes a disaster hurt any less from this side of the screen, and Star Citizen’s 4.8 patch is really hurtin’ us right now. All things being equal, there’s nothing in this patch that CIG hasn’t released in kind before. It added in the Tactical Strike Group mission, a few new ships, some FPS weapons, the new ship insurance approach, and a bunch of other additions and updates. There were issues on the PTU in the run-up to the release date, however, like how the patch’s set-piece new ship, the Ironclad, couldn’t fly because the command module was non-functional and the only workaround was to destroy the existing command module and attach a replacement. Thankfully, CIG managed to fix that one before releasing the patch.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of other things that made it out the door which really shouldn’t have. Ship insurance for one. The new system allows us to insure a specific ship load-out, meaning if we modify a ship, or store weapons and tools in the weapons lockers, and if we lose the ship due to misadventure, we can file a claim to either get the stock loadout back, or can get the loadout we insured. That sounds cool, except when you understand that players lose more ships to the game being a cranky bitch than they do to misadventure. Ships get eaten by the hangar elevators, or players glitch through the floors and leave their ship inaccessible, or ships get impounded and sent into video game limbo for which the only recourse is to file a claim. In other bug-related news, missions have been failing to show, failing to appear in the world, or failing to complete. This is important because, as mentioned in a previous post, 4.8 came with a player wipe. Everyone has lost reputation with NPC factions. Everyone is poor. Obtaining sundries like tractor beams for cargo missions, ammo for FPS weapons, or refuel, repair, and rearming of spacecraft, costs money that people can’t earn if they can’t take, carry out, or complete missions. And of course the map and navigation is fucked up…again. You can set your watch by how often traversal wrrecks everything. Some of these issues might be related to the crush of players returning, and thing might only get worse as a free-fly event is scheduled for Friday, but not everything can be explained thusly. All in all, 4.8 could have used more time to cook.

Chat, of course, defaults to “they needed the money” as the reason why the patch was released, but I don’t think that’s an accurate or complete assessment. The first of the yearly events, Drake DefenseCon, né Invictus Launch Week, started yesterday, and that was a wall that CIG was up against because several of the ships advertised as being available for the event relied on the patch being released. Much has been made of CIG’s financials, and most of it is wrong and/or misinterpreted by people who probably don’t even know how to write a cheque, but if anyone is to blame for this debacle, it’s CIG’s marketing arm.

DefenseCon should have been postponed to give CIG an end-of-month deadline this year. They’ve been playing with the patch schedules over the past year and a half, and it’s not like CIG has ever been consistent in that regard anyway. If DrakeCon has been set for the end of May or beginning of June, it would have upset the historic apple-cart for this event’s release, but knowing that they’re on a two-month update cadence, the release of 4.8 and the event would have meshed more naturally. I don’t want to insinuate that CIG knew they had problems with the patch before they knew they had problems, but I’m just throwing out ideas.

I suspect it’s not that easy, though. Someone in general chat during the first hour of the patch’s release was asking — possibly in bad faith based on the way they were doggedly phrasing their “questions” — why CIG needed to follow any kind of cadence, considering they have no publisher and have said on numerous occasions that they aren’t beholden to anyone for reaching milestones (hence why the game is still in alpha). That is not entirely true. At first blush, people might assume that we, the ones who have pledged for ships and who “fund the development” have a lever though which we can made demands. I am not a legal scholar, but I suspect that we customers have much less sway over CIG than many think we do. CIG has lawyers who draft EULAs and such; we have Reddit, Spectrum, Discord, and our own sense of self-importance, none of which would stand up in court. What people do not know, or which they choose to ignore, is that CIG has other, single-point investors who, for some reason, have thrown millions into the game with a mere flourish of the pen. People who can throw that kind of money around aren’t trawling Reddit for legal advice; they go into deals like this with their own corps of lawyers who work with CIG’s lawyers to form a mutually advantageous partnership. While both groups want an amicable outcome, CIG can be tied to milestones insisted on by these big-ticket investors.

I suspect that there are overall milestones that CIG needs to reach as well as incremental milestones. One of those might be these yearly events like ILW and Fleet Week where pledge income spikes. The arrival of new ships, or delivery of older concept ships, has traditionally been a financial windfall for CIG, and those opportunities may be tied to the contracts they have with big-ticket investors. As much as it would have been nice to give 4.8 even two more weeks to cook, CIG may have been contractually obligated to hold their event now, and in order to do so, had to have a patch to release.

If you are interested in an examination of CIG’s 2024 financial statement, Space Tomato had a talk with a finance guy who went through their public release documents and explained all of the legalese contained therein.

It’s an interesting un-raveling of an oft-raised set of points from the perspective of someone who knows how to parse it, and goes well beyond some angry cadre of disillusioned customers claiming theories as fact from the depts of some social media hole.

Unfortunately, 4.8 as it stands right now is a mess. I tried the simplest of missions — the single 0.5 SCU box delivery missions from point A to point B — and while I was able to get one mission complete early after the patch released, I tried three others times to complete similar missions, with no luck. I and my friends have been struggling with star map and navigation, as many destinations are unelectable on the map, and point-and-travel navigation (aligning with the mission marker to lock in the quantum destination) has failed. I’m hesitant to try anything other than simple point-to-point missions like these because I don’t have enough money to outfit myself with the things I lost in the wipe, like the tractor beams, ammo, and medigel. While I have been “pinning” my ship loadouts every time I raise a ship to fly, claiming a custom ship fit would damn near bankrupt me right now because I’m unable to find a decent, reliable source of income. On top of that, people have been posting “evidence” that the theorized purpose of the wipe — to reset a duping economy after having closed the most egregious for-profit exploits — was moot, as there are gold-sellers hawking aUEC by the truckload only hours after the patch dropped. It seems that we’re fighting the patch more than we are benefitting from it, which for the past year and a half was not how CIG was performing. I wouldn’t say that it’s as bad as the rightfully vilified 3.18 patch, but it’s certainly taking pages from that patch cycle’s playbook. I feel that this is a debacle that could have been avoided on paper, but the reality of game development and CIG’s possible need to satiate big-ticket investors created a perfect storm that we’re going to have to weather for a few weeks…maybe until 4.9 arrives.