It clashes with some of their own funding promises!
The Star Citizen Thread v5
- Thread starter Brett C
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It clashes with some of their own funding promises!
To be fair soft release doesn't imply breaking any of those promises. IF they backtrack even more...then yes, i is huge can of Thargoids right there.
It kind of sounds like they'll be making a fairly ordinary area of game-play with the constant promise of it being 100 times bigger anytime soon(tm). Imagine if you had something like The Witcher except you could only go to a couple of villages and play a very small amount of quests and everyone said it's ok year after year because it'll be 100 times bigger one day. I very much doubt they will call it a release, as the funding is coming in already. But it's a neat way of pushing out some very fancy "high fidelity" scripted missions and "content" into a small slice of game without having to worry about all those nasty questions people keep asking like how's this thing going to scale. It'll be cheaper to run too.
The MVP approach is a good one, but what about the 4-5 years of telling us this grand game of 100 high fidelity star systems was "coming together"? What if they have to rebuild a significant amount of it by the time they do start scaling it up, that won't happen right? Roberts said he's building his castle so that it didn't need rebuilding unlike other games.
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Let's call what it is - Chris Roberts realizing he can't build it all at once and that way he tried to do things doesn't scale much. That he will drive himself bankrupt if he will try to deliver 100 unique systems at launch. What's sad thing he doesn't admit being wrong openly, just twist words for backers that he have done no wrong. But that's Chris for you.
Anyway, I will guess this means that SC Alpha 3.0/4.0 could lead to MVP. Still 2 years to go.
Anyway, I will guess this means that SC Alpha 3.0/4.0 could lead to MVP. Still 2 years to go.
It allows them to maintain the ongoing funding narrative.
Just over the next hill guys!
As long as enough whales keeping buying into it it could go on for some time.
If it all goes Pete Tong it'll be;
"Well we don't really know what happened - everyone was all like yayyy but now they're all like naaaahh - still we tried - thanks for all the fish!!
Just over the next hill guys!
As long as enough whales keeping buying into it it could go on for some time.
If it all goes Pete Tong it'll be;
"Well we don't really know what happened - everyone was all like yayyy but now they're all like naaaahh - still we tried - thanks for all the fish!!
I still don't think the problem is the content, the assets in others words.
We already know they had in the game a ton of assets unused for months or even years, from cities to ships(and probably they already had a big pool of missions, audio and text conversations between npcs, etc etc). The problem is the tech(the core tech), that's what the game and internally surely has been lacking. That's what they aim for in 3.0 (not all the tech but the core tech), to have the tech needed to make the game finally take form(I would not call this even MVP).
Missions, places, stations, entire systems may very well had been working on for months... but without the tech for having hundreds of players or the mission system, roles, party system, grabby hands,FPS, reputations, AI... [hotas]:S
If they get to put the right tech in place in the following months(or they give great news in CitizenCon or 3.0 will barely be possible this year), the content will not be a issue. If not... well... they'd better hurry.
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The problem is that all of those assets are probably not (directly) compatible with the game today. I think in the Kotaku article they mentioned that character size had changed, leading to all the assets needing to be modified. It looks like the lighting has also changed, PBR, 64-bit, corridor sizes etc.
I assume some of the assets are 'good', but a lot of it may be little better than a 'visual guide' for a designer to redesign/implement.
Reading that article feels like no one at CIG has worked on serious design prototyping before. Amount of stuff actually put into code and models just to be scrapped is staggering, expensive and feels useless.
I suspect majority of content most likely will require retouching, and refitted for de facto system which will they have now.
The thing is that building assets without having the core engine ready means that you will need to rework it to fit, and we've seen in CR's Kotaku interview that this has already happened multiple times which is a massive waste of resources (and, more importantly, backers' money). There are also a lot of fundamental gameplay aspects in that missing tech that you listed - their AI demos have been pretty depressing, the Gamescom demo mission seemed pretty annoying (far too much faffing about required, it will get old quickly and I say that as someone who tries to 100% BioWare games! [where is it] ), and I'm pretty sure that getting "hundreds" of users in an instance for FPS is basically impossible without sacrificing the "fidelity" that CR seems obsessed with.
I'm sure that folks at CIG have been doing a lot of good work, that isn't the issue!
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TBH The way that I read the articles was that every major design decision went through CR, and he regularly changed his mind after things has already been produced. I have a feeling that stuff was prototyped, design leads OKed it (fitted whatever brief they had) but when punted to the top it was pushed back.
There's a word for this in advertising: re-briefing. If you want to actually lose money on client work it's a great way to go.
According to the Jennison letter I think. CR had an unapproval process for things that he had previously approved.
It's pretty much the same thing. Concept gets initial approval, a lot of work put into it by relevant creative/tech/etc teams, gets to the final sign-off and senior person x says "can we just change these parts as I and/or client have had another idea?".
Rinse.
Repeat.
Unless your workflow says that this ain't going to happen you're screwed. And it has to be the senior folks in the process who enforce. If said senior folks are the ones causing the problems then game over.
Yes - when you already have significant technical changes you really do need Mr Obssesive attention to detail that most people won't even notice in charge of knocking everything backwards periodically..
I don't care how many times you have to do it - do it till you prove me wrong!
ETA - so is this dog and pony show going on for three days?
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Repeated because it's been a feature of every horrible production process I've been involved in - and this whole project honks of it.
Gotta be worth mentioning how rough this is on devs too leaving projects feeling inescapable and removing all pride in anything you produce as your expertise and opinion is rendered completely irrelevant, null and void. Then the run-on into the next project under a different lead whose just getting more irate as you should be done now etc - and always the pressure from mgmt that if you were good enough and listened enough and were a proper team player right with the program you would have gotten it right first time.
Again with the 1.5 million backers crap, don't these people fact check anything?
AKA don't stop buying shiny spaceships.... please..
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Without the vaguest shadow of a doubt. Fidelity man has been saying this about the hundreds of hours in one system thing in recent months. I think if this does release they'll have the current system "fleshed out" and maybe 2 others to give some sense of a loop.
That article is irritating to read though throughout. He talks of "doing it right" and "quality first and foremost". I must have experienced some other game then because neither of those statements I can apply to this garbage which led to my refund recently.
Which completely defeats the point indeed. He could release one square mile with a billion things to, but thats not what people pledged for. And you cant say "sorry for not releasing the promised 100 systems in 2014, but thats because we're adding so much more." and then release less than 100 systems. Regardless, they are shifting gears and clearly heading towards MVP release, with the emphasis on 'minimum', with lots of doubts about the 'viable' part. But more on that after a cool video on sunday.
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its all coming in elite, slowly and steady, we haven't seen any of the atmospheric planetary tech yet from FD so until then no one knows, including Mr. CR.
Now it's looking like the Stanton system is the MVP we should start doing MVP bingo and guess what's getting cut (being worked on in the background in marketing speak).
I think they'll drop alien races (and all the stuff that goes with them) as they wouldn't all be crammed into the Stanton system. Except the vandal's which they need for plan 9 from outer Stanton.
I think they'll drop alien races (and all the stuff that goes with them) as they wouldn't all be crammed into the Stanton system. Except the vandal's which they need for plan 9 from outer Stanton.
Because they have maxed out community on "crowdfunding" phase. They need to switch to "early access" phase, where they can spend 4 years or more.
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