Some clarity there would be nice I suppose. The guys at Subset seemed to have a very clear plan when they made FTL. They hit it perfectly. They didn’t fall into the kickstarter trap of promising more and more for stretch goals. They just made the game they said they would and they did it well.
Tom M
ohhhh…sorry - I seriously did not understand what you meant by FTL - Its the GAME FTL of course…sorry about that, and thanks for the explanation!
This whole project is sounding more and more Smartian to me every day, only the good Doctor wasted his own money and nothing near $42M. Somebody needs to show Roberts the original Star Wars, and then one of the “prequel” films, and go, “See? SEE? That’s what happens!”
Crazy that Braben’s KS seems to be going swimmingly considering his past decade of broken promises of Elite 4 for over a decade.
I gotta say I’m pretty tired of dense asteroid and debris fields in space games. God I miss tie fighter.
Because you get dense mine fields in Tie Fighter.
And you get to fight in them :)
I don’t want to sound like I am not super excited for this game. Freelancer is one of my favorites of all time, but this business model feels a bit shady/shilly. The game demo looked awesome, but this project is insanely ambitious. I hope it can live up to the hype. (Then I will buy in full force!)
I’ll be the negative nelly. What I saw in the PAX East demo video was pretty, but not $42 million pretty. It’s the CryEngine, so I would’ve been shocked if it looked bad. I bet a good CryEngine modder could make a decent “vertical slice” bit similar to the showing. What I didn’t see was any real gameplay. Certainly nothing approaching the crazy ambitious stuff they’ve promised.
The helmet flipping, stumbling for the correct hotspot to get the ship’s ladder down, the lock-on animation - all that stuff seemed like it would be good once or twice, then you’d never want to see it again. Just get me in the ship and flying. I’m sure this stuff will get streamlined in development, but I was disappointed that they didn’t show anything substantial. Just a lot of flash.
I guess selling $100 virtual ships takes most of their resources.
This is true. I am sold on this game for the vast space exploration and interstellar trading. I want to live my gaming dream of being a space Han Solo, running illegal stuff past blockades, outrunning the cops and doing the the fastest trade run (measured in units of distance).
Are we truly complaining that the game is too expensive at $42 million? Isn’t this Chris trying to create what would be considered a AAA space game, but with a large indie budget?
For myself, it’s not the money that’s worrisome. It’s that I’m afraid that the plan will come apart or take a detour. The money for extra ships model also bothers me, and makes me think they’re putting too much emphasis on a monetization scheme instead of gameplay design.
I grouse but I want to be clear I’m not rooting for the game to fail. No one wins in that case. I have very fond memories of playing Wing Commander and no one can mess with that but there are a lot of red flags here. I hope I’m wrong.
Tom M
Shit, man. I want this game to be badass awesome. I want Star Citizen to use every bit of that $42 million to make the kind of crazy infinite space trading and fighting game that Roberts has been yearning to make. I would love it if some angel investor swooped in like Notch did for Age of Wonders 3 and gave them even more money to blow us all away.
What I’ve seen so far is a company that seems to be caught up in feature creep and selling virtual ships for mad money. That demo from PAX East? Nice, but that’s it? They promised a lot more before they even got to the stretch goals. And they have a lot of stretch goals.
In contrast, Elite seems to be trucking along as a lean, agile project.
It’s not the monetization scheme that bothers me on its own, that’s fine, it’s all part of business. What worries me is whether they can walk (dream up monetization schemes) and chew gum (actually design the games) at the same time, because we’re not seeing any evidence of the latter just yet, and while it’s still early days, it’s getting to the point where we need to see actual gameplay stuff that’s as well-developed and slick as the Elite vids soon.
And that last clip didn’t heighten confidence. Either they should have gotten a better player to demo, or the basic gameplay of getting into a cockpit, flying, and trying to hit things, really is that clunky.
I haven’t backed this game so I don’t really have a dog in this race (aside from wanting awesome space games), but polish is not something I’d ever expect at this early stage of development. If the controls are clunky, they have quite a while to refine it and get it right so I’m not at all concerned on that front. On the other hand, the insane feature creep and everything else… well, there’s a reason I haven’t backed this project.
I think the active monetization engine is particularly offensive at this stage precisely because there is no proven gameplay core.
Tom M
I agree, the whole project has really started to feel skeezy to me for a while. They’ve raked in 40+ million dollars, which certainly had to blow their original expectations out of the water. It’s fine to leave contributions open, but at this point just shut up and put your money where your mouth is, RSI.
Hmm, but surely feature creep is a bad thing only in the context of doing something the traditional way with a publisher? What’s wrong with feature creep in something funded like this?
They want to make a stonker of a game with everything and the kitchen sink in it, and that’s also what lots of funders also want. For example, s-f is canonically always ground and space, we only have just-space s-f games because of technical and financial limitations. If RSI can pull off the whole kit and kaboodle in a flexible solo/multiplayer/MMO format, that will be a great thing, and well worth paying for.
The thing that’s given me most confidence about SC was hearing about the efforts they’ve put in to making the internet basis for the game really solid and suitable for an MMO, the way they’re instancing things, etc. - it seems like it’s basically going to be EVE-like, but cleverly done with stuff under the hood so that people who don’t want the silly side of EVE to intrude needn’t have that, but they can still have a bit of the element of danger from PvP that makes EVE great, sufficient to spice it up, as it were, but not to the extent of EVE’s Vindaloo curry.
None of those efforts are showable just yet, but it shows they’ve got their heads screwed on for the bigger picture, at least.
But I do want to see an Elite-D level quality of basic gameplay soon. There needs to be people raving about the basic gameplay of SC like they already are about Elite even at this stage.
It’s a problem because just getting the core of a game “right” is an enormous challenge. Out of the hundreds or thousands of games released each year, how many are truly great? How many completely fall on their face, get cancelled, or just fall flat?
The warchest they’ve built up is impressive (unbelievable, when it comes to independently funded titles), but it’s hardly an unlimited budget. The addition of new features mean less attention for the others. Take a look at Dragon Commander, which is a recent game that tried to mash up 4X strategy, politics, and RTS battles. How well did that work out? I would say the consensus is the game would have been stronger if the time and treasure spent on the RTS portion had been spent on the core game instead. The RTS portion could have been cool, but it needed a lot more work before it added to the experience. They tried to do too much with what they had, and while it was a valiant attempt, the game just didn’t pan out.
Granted, Star Citizen has a far larger budget than something like Dragon Commander ever did, but similarly the scope of the is also massively larger. To me, that means there are more areas for the stitching to come undone and the game fall apart. I’d much rather they develop the best core space sim experience they can and keep an eye on the future. If the core game is amazing, great! Roll out the FPS or other features as expansions further down the road.
This project is just starting to remind me of an exuberant kid running down a hill so fast that his legs come out from under him. I’m worried they’re going to end up faceplanting into the sidewalk.
I think anyone who’s played Battlecruiser, release version natch, is going to tread cautiously here. The more you promise, the harder it is to deliver.
I’ve been inside the sausage factory for a lot of games, and, yeah, that’s definitely true. But you simply don’t take something that unpolished and shaky and demo it, especially to the public. It sets off a lot of red flags.
Good point.