I’d be very surprised if it was more than about £20m. The original budget was supposedly £8m, and looking at their financials leading up to the release it looks like they actually spent around £11m on the base game.
It’s pretty clear that the vast majority of Frontier’s development resources were allocated to other titles post-launch, so I’d be astonished if they had doubled the original spend on Horizons and Odyssey.
Most of us have actually done this years ago but at a much smaller scale due to budget. Existing in fp mode, while entering vehicles, aircraft etc has been around for decades. Heck, I did it long before the first Battlefield blew our minds.
If you peel away all the visuals and the convoluted layers, there really isn’t anything special about Star Citizen. Yes, I can’t be relied upon to be an objective observer, but I think that I have enough gaming cred for people to know that I can in fact make an unbiased opinion.
fps → ship → space → planet → land → exit → fps
That’s it. All of it. Everything else is just boring, pointless, fluff that they keep adding in order to prolong (and keep raising money) this farce for as long as possible.
What is “immersion” in your view?
So you haven’t seen the latest SQ42 newsletter yet, have you? Well check this sh*t out from the newsletter that went out last evening.
Meanwhile over there.…
From the same article:
“The eat and drink behavior continued to be improved, particularly ‘chowline’ usage. In addition to cleaning up the chowline, eating, and drinking animations, they improved the drinking behavior to make taking a cup a separate action. Plus, exit animations are now split between taking the tray and exiting tables so that multiple actions can be performed from specific bounce poses.”
I mean…yeah. What more could you ask for?
Great progress was made on a pair of complicated scenes from chapter 11
Engineering made great progress with volumetric clouds last month
March saw the artists start a significant concepting pass for an enemy faction
The surrender and cowering behaviors used by both trained and untrained agents progressed.
Progress was also made on … AI hygiene … mess halls, and eateries.
Throughout March, the Cinematics Team made big pushes on ship-centric cutaways
Extra lockers were added to the main bathroom in the Idris, so several scenes were updated to match the new layout
The Space/Dogfight Team worked towards an internal milestone this quarter with the support of many other teams, with all chapters that include space flight benefiting from the initiative.
There has never been a bigger waste of resources than this travesty of a ‘game’.
Those new clouds are a big improvement on the old ones. Going to be pretty sweet flying through them.
But yes, teams always make significant progress on everything in those letters. :)
Eh. They have a ton of 3D artists. They can’t really hang up their 3D modelling tools and start working on server meshing. And the animations have been getting better over time.
It’s all still just a tiny bit over the top though.
One would think companies never had to deal with these issues before.
I think the point is the resources used to hire those artists could have been better deployed to actually make a game.
FFS, no respect for the chow line in here or what?
I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t know what a “specific bounce pose” is; but I’ll try to struggle on nevertheless.
Art assets and animation improvements are the areas that they can easily show progress in order to maintain the facade that a game will be released.
Scratching your ass in zero gravity is now 64% realer.
It’s the ability of the game to immerse you in its world, story, systems in a way that makes you feel like you are truly part of / interacting with a coherent system.
This can be true of more abstract games. You can become totally immersed in the story of your civilisation in a Civ game.
But, as far as Star Citizen is concerned, it’s the same type of immersion you might find in Flight Simulator. The world is rendered to the nth degree, with a plethora of details both in locations and on ships. The actions you carry out sell the fiction of your character (the way you access your ship, the way you can traverse it and inspect every detail, interact with the upgrades and panels, …). And this focus on immersion continues with the way you can jump in a turret or undock a fighter on your friend’s Constellation to help defend it, you and your friends can fly together, mine together, explore cave systems together, … Flying a ship and looking at it from the outside, you can see each thruster at work, and you feel the difference when they get damaged.
It’s all awesome… until the jank or a crash or missing systems take you out of the fiction, of course.
It’s true you can do the walking around a station, flying, going FPS in other games. Though not necessarily aiming to that degree of “realism”. I mean, in what other space game game can you have as much fun counting rivets in your spaceship?
(there is a whole series of those)
A lot of those details slow the game down and are not for everyone (and let me say here that I recognise they also fall in the “I didn’t ask for this” type of feature creep). But they do sell the fiction and immerse the player in the world.
Oh yes. I do not disagree. Though it is that crazy desire to render everything in that much detail that kind of sets SC aside. I think you will find that the vast majority of the people who backed SC in the first couple of years were not asking for this and were expecting to play a simpler and more complete game much sooner. It certainly was true for me. So your point definitely stands.
Since I have those early ships, I still get to have fun flying around the current iteration. But it’s not what I thought I was signing up for!
So I definitely am not the fun police and it’s cool that you’re enjoying yourself, but the whole fact that it is not at all what they promised from the start or promised along the way is what just blows my mind. They have sold this as a large universe (100+ systems) from the kickstarter beginning and we’re 8 years in and they still have a single star system in the game hosted in instances on a single server. They show absolutely no indication that they are anywhere close to actually getting ‘server meshing’ done. They have missed countless announced dates on the single player game and despite often claiming it was almost done they are 8 years later still sending out updates about how they are working on NPC characters picking up lunch trays.
I’ve been computer gaming since 1980. And I used to be a writer in the industry (as others here are/were.) Immersion is something I’ve discussed with a lot of people over the years/decades.
I believe that incredible, is it real or simulated graphics are not at all required for full immersion. In fact, in some cases I think the deepest I have gotten into a game, the most I have lost myself entirely in the game world, came from games where most of the graphics were in my mind. There was a text Sci Fi adventure game written by a real Sci Fi writer, the game’s name was Oo Topos, that was released in 1980. I can tell you EXACTLY what the jail cell I started out in looked like. I can relive the sights and smells of the weird halls I was in trying to escape this unusual place. I can picture everything in that world. In 1986 they re-released it with graphics. For me, it completely destroyed the immersion. The graphics were nowhere near as detailed as in my mind.
I love the high end graphics in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Witcher 3 and the DCS sims. But I still, even in those games, create a lot of the world in my mind.
Where graphics can destroy immersion is when they try to get extremely detailed and then screw it up. You can so detailed that suddenly you create an expectation that everything has to look exactly like the real world rather than filling in the gaps in your mind. The LAST thing that will add to immersion for me is trying to reproduce minutiae like picking up a cup and drinking from it, like trying to make sure people are pulling up their bedsheets the right way, etc. Because they will always fall short of reality.
Great graphics are great, I love them, but only to a point do they help you get lost in the game world.
Those are some damn nice clouds.
You certainly have put more time thinking aobut immersion than I have, so no argument from me. Especially as I play tabletop RPG’s and a lot of story driven games (both on the PC and boardgames). Immersion in those comes from the theater of the mind much more than a few props on your computer screen or on the table.
But there is also the type of immersion you get in the latest Flight Simulator version, where you are flying what looks and feels like real planes in what looks like the real world. That can sell the fiction. But it does not create those memorable moments or living worlds that you mention on its own for sure.
Oh, and your point on falling into that uncanny valley when you spend too much time worrying about how characters pull bedsheets is well made. I hadn’t considered that, but it’s very true.
Thank you? I’ll continue doing so then. :)
Oh, and as is probably clear from the screenshots I have posted, this is me going to explore a planet and its moons or trying out a game system like deliveries, ship cargo or mining. They tend to be 1 or 2 hour diversions and seeing the sights type of things. So I’ll repeat my warning: those are beautiful and fun systems to toy around with, but don’t spend money on SC expecting a game, which justifies the general tone of this thread. Even if I personally prefer talking about what’s there to see and experiences flying in the verse than making the 5000th joke about jpegs.