Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

[dsmart]

@SadleyBradley

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.

Totally doable. And I could make that game for $10m.