There’s no way to climb out of this much technical debt. It would probably be easier to start from 0 than to start from wherever they are now. This is like a case study in how stretch goals can harm development.
The best case scenario is that they buy Elite Dangerous and reskin it. Elite is reportedly adding an FPS mode in the next expansion. That would give them a playable base.
As I mentioned above the character faces and idle movements in that recently posted video with the great soundtrack and editing look really good. They’ve definitely developed a lot of stuff that’s pretty neat, they just seem incapable of focusing on an actual game rather than producing neat stuff.
It’s like the whole project is ADD. It reminds me of random hobby projects I do sometimes with no goal but just to learn some new technology. I build neat shit until I get bored. Half of it is incomplete since I got distracted by some other interesting facet of the technology.
I wonder if they’ll be able to package and sell of any of the working little bits they seem to have when the jig is finally up.
Along with the general fact that they are still running on a decade+ old small map FPS engine to try and make a space MMORPG with an endless army of recent college grads, the other thing is that along the way they have promised basically everything.
They have not promised a really good space game, they have promised Ready Player One’s Oasis.
There’s a reason that they don’t have Chris Roberts talk anymore, every time he did he "yes, and"ed every insane idea like a beginner improve class.
Yeah, the project management is just half of the doom. Trying to use a quarter inch wood chisel to carve Mt. Rushmore is certainly not leading them on a path to success. Either one alone would likely doom it.
Pray tell, what do they have that 1) hasn’t been done before 2) that experience devs couldn’t do - if they wanted it.
I’ll wait.
You are challenging me to demonstrate things I didn’t say over a statement where I say I wonder if something might happen? Okay, keep waiting then.
Well, unless I misunderstood you, the notion of “I wonder if…” implies that you were thinking out loud. So my response was in that same vein whereby I was asking you what “working little bits” you were wondering about and which led you to start wondering about that particular venture.
So I will just take your response to mean that you don’t believe that they do have any “working little bits” that they could possibly be able to “package and sell…when the jig is finally up”
I was going to write out some devil’s advocate nonsense about brainstorming how the game could be saved, but the more I thought about it, the less I believed in it. You’d need to change the scope completely (obviously), and you’d also need to redesign the whole thing from the ground up.
Imagine if they had positioned themselves as the opposite of Elite - where Elite is a mile wide and an inch deep, Star Citizen would be an inch wide but a mile deep. One system, absolutely packed to the gills with stuff to do. Each planet an earth-sized playground with all their terraforming, landowning, base-building dreams realized. Massive, procedurally-generated land masses littered with hand-crafted PvE adventures and quests. A player-run economy like Eve that makes everyone from the lowliest miner to the assembly station magnate a necessary and important part of the supply chain. Giant space stations in which you could walk around and see all the window-dressing nonsense like hot dogs and news broadcasts. All running on a gorgeous custom engine, developed to provide detailed visuals with high playercounts.
You could probably make that game for 350 million. Instead, they’re going to try and make it a hundred times over, with an engine that won’t cooperate, while expanding their scope with stuff no one asked for.
You are free to take my responses any way you want. I’m used to it.
If they switch focus only to SQ42 (which of course they can’t do), or perhaps spawned it off under a competent manager, it’s possible it would see the light of day. I wouldn’t place bets on it happening but it would be in the realm of possibility. SQ42 can be an actual finite game rather than the exercise in boundless scope creep that is the MMO.
So why would you end with a passive-aggressive stinger like that? That’s just going to put someone on the defensive and I’m sure you know that given how long you’ve been on the internet! With two syllables, we’ve gone from all having a laugh at the Star Citizen farce to the appearance that you’re calling someone out to defend something he probably didn’t even mean.
This is why we can have nice things, @dsmart!
-Tom
Totally doable. And I could make that game for $10m.
Right. But that ship too already sailed. Know why? Because SQ42 uses the same engine and locales as Star Citizen. It’s precisely why that smaller game still hasn’t been released.
True, but it’s not like there’s only one reason SQ42 hasn’t been released ;)
That wasn’t my intent at all. As you can see from my follow-up response, I was honestly waiting for his response because I was puzzled by his statement and thought that I was missing something in what he was thinking. Apparently I wasn’t. shrug
Some bugs.
Well that’s true. But honestly, had they focused on the core parts that were needed for SQ42, it would have a greater chance of release. But SQ42 doesn’t sell JPEGs. Star Citizen does. So they had to focus on that.
Also, SQ42 is just an afterthought/bonus to backers seeing as most of them were already entitled to it anyway. It’s precisely why CIG split the games into two - an act that got them sued by Crytek - because it was the only way for them to get “new” money for it, having already spent the money that backers poured into CIG for that specific game.
EDIT: It’s that quest for “new” money that had them introduce the concept of warbonds too in order to get new money from backers who were just melting inventory to buy better ships. This whole thing has turned out to be more about making money than about making a game - of any kind.
Sq42 only could possibly work, but what do you do with the huge empty cities and planets they created? And SC would have to be scoped down to around 20 players per instance. What a waste.
Well to be fair, all of the planetary scenes and stations they’ve since added, were sufficient to build SQ42 around if you think of them as “levels” as in other games.