Well the "bland and uninspired" is your personal assessment
Not really, no. It's all stuff we've seen a bajillion different times in a bajillion different shovelware games and movies. I mean, it's not really surprising considering how much we've seen them rip off existing stuff in the concept art that drives those designs — of course the final product will look like everything else since that's where they got it from.
Well actually I think it reall is different because how many games do you get to test while the engine is being built?
Quite a few. Hell, there's an entire secondary marketplace on Steam that lets you do that these days. Not to mention games that are continuously being updated — games like, say, EVE online.
But again, that's not really the point here. The point is that SC is simply not at an alpha state yet. Even CIG says as much. The question is
when will it be, because at the current pace, a proper alpha seems a very far way off. There's just too much missing, not just in terms of content and foundation, but in actual tools needed to do any of the testing that gives an alpha its purpose.
I find that Star Citizen is up there with the best in terms of visuals/graphical quality.
It's CryEngine 3 graphical quality, which is decent enough, but it's definitely starting to show its age. Not even CIG is dumb enough to fiddle with the single thing that CE3 has going for it: its rendering pipeline, so short of an complete engine replacement, it's already behind the top performers out now.
That wouldn't be much of a problem in and of itself though, since most of visual quality these days comes in the form of having intelligently made assets — the stuff people made the last-gen engines do at the end of their lives was still pretty spectacular compared to what the same engine did just a few years later. But that's where Chris' lack of experience starts to show, what with his reliance on pure geometry and similar brute-force methods, and his explicit distaste for the graphics tricks that every good engine makes use of to look good. He has picked the worst way possible to create the detail he's longing for, and it just not a good solution for where he wants to end up. It is pointless busywork for the artists; it doesn't scale; it's far more costly to un-approve (which he's fond of); and it's far more problematic to make modular, which they desperately need it to be. It's shades of Strike Commander all over again…
2 Games built at the same time. 1 Composer for each game. Seems about right. [big grin]
So he's not actually “sticking with that portugueser”. That's good news, at least.
