Gaming
Star Citizen Backers Grow Restless As Development Falters
Star Citizen, an upcoming space sim MMO, is starting to run into trouble with its Kickstarter backers. The game made headlines back in 2012 when it reached record-breaking crowdfunding success, but those backers are voicing some concerns. One of Star Citizen’s key backers recently had his pledge refunded over an apparent dispute with the developer, Cloud Imperium Games. Now, three years on from the campaign, the game is still in development with no end in sight and many backers are after a refund.
It all started three days ago. One of Star Citizen’s earliest backers, Derek Smart, the founder of development studio 3000AD, got a curt email (via gamerant) telling him his pledge of $250 was being refunded and that he no longer had any agreement with Cloud Imperium Games.
According to Star Citizen developers, Smart was cut off because he was using his pledge to further promote his own games.
“It was obvious he was not a supporter of our project and was just using our visibility as a platform to gain attention and promote his current game and his past games. We have strict rules about people using our forums and chat for self-promotion and it was clear that he didn’t care about the project, or the backers, or a good game being made. He was just trying to create a huge fuss to make himself relevant at a lot of other people’s expense and distress. So we enacted our rights through Kickstarter (that we also have on our own TOS) and refunded him and turned his account off.”
Smart wasn’t happy about this statement and took to Twitter to accuse Cloud Imperium Games of looking to refund all $2.1 million Kickstarter funds in order to get out of their contract with their backers. That might seem like a lot of money, but Star Citizen actually has a massive $85 million budget. It’s a little convoluted, but back when the Kickstarter campaign finished in 2012, Cloud Imperium took to other avenues to raise further funds. In short, over 900,000 people contributed a total of more than $85 million to Star Citizen. So refunding the $2.1 million Kickstarter funds wouldn’t put much of a dent in the game.
Despite that massive budget, however, the game is well past its original November 2014 release date. Currently, there is no official release date. Smart says that the backers will be “screwed” if Cloud Imperium refunds them outside of taking legal action through the courts. Smart also says Cloud Imperium wanted him gone because he was the one most able to call them out on their “dev nonsense with regard to the game.”
Smart isn’t the only backer to voice concerns about Star Citizen, with many others worried about the litany of promises made by the game’s creator, Chris Roberts. There have been too many delays to count, and on top of that, Cloud Imperium has lost a couple of its highest-ranking members. Smart’s assertions that the developer is looking to be free of its contract with its Kickstarter backers is only leading them to be more restless about the state of Star Citizen.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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