Finally got the time to watch the Gamescom demo. I'm actually not bothered about bugs or crashes in an Alpha (or even a Beta) build. As a software dev who's given lots of demos, I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has one go wrong like that. (But by God did they handle it badly! No plan for what to do when it went wrong. Ended up having to repeat all the previous actions as if sticking to scripted actions for fear of going off-plan and hitting a mine-field of new bugs. And Chris Roberts 'secretly' calling for them to get off the loading screen over and over... Yikes).
My concern is the more you raise the bar with graphics; environmental complexity, variety and entropy; environmental interactivity; multiplayer interaction; contiguous gameplay in lieu of fade-to-black transitions etc., they all raise the bar dramatically in terms of the time, effort and cost to add anything to the game. Building a galactic simulator would be trivial, if you do it as a text adventure. They're promising such a level of detail it's going to take a proverbial age to implement any kind of reasonably sized game-world. This game is years off release (or else, any MVP is going to be a microscopic game world).
If CIG did estate agents...
Customer: When's our apartment going to be ready to move into?
CIG: Look at these cups! Aren't they beautiful? See the detail and finish! Now, look at these kitchen drawers, see how they move? And we have this amazing new form of concrete..
Customer: Errr, ok. Which floor is it on?
CIG: Did I mention the drawers? See? In..out..in..out... wait a minute. Can we go back to the loading screen? I was able to push and pull these earlier without the wall falling down.... Heheh.
Customer: ...ok. And how big is the apartment?
CIG: ....wanna buy a cup?
I am kidding a bit. I thought the 'face over IP' bit was a very cool addition to the social side of gaming; plus I'd absolutely love to be able to explore ships the size of the Idris. I actually would prefer to see SC make it to release, with a small, but very detailed and interesting game world rather than ED's massive but empty, repetitive and simplistic game world and dynamics. I get the feeling both of these games are going to let me down in very different ways!
