I'm personally not aware of any game that's achieved what CIG is trying to achieve with SC. ED comes close, but their plan is to spread it out over a longer period - CIG want most of what ED will have in future content, to be at release.
This nonsense again.
Many many many games have achieved what CIG is trying to achieve. From old games long forgotten (Star Flight) to old obscure DOS games made by one dude (Noctis IV) to modern quality khantent from indies, big time devs, and one russian guy (Space Engine, Space Engineers, KSP, Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, Rodina, Hellion...).
Of course, the usual SC (type 10) Defender's response is two fold, here I'll make it for you:
"But it's never been done with this high quality graphics."
"But it's never been done all together in one game."
Let's break these two claims down and figure out why both these arguments fail.
The quality of graphics - Do not matter. Seriously, they don't, in relation to how long it takes to implement basic features such as a good flight model, the ability to walk without falling through the floor, and the like. The prettiness of it is handled typically by the artists and the engine. The artists make the assets and the engine renders them and applies all the nice shaders and lighting. At no point does this stop Joe Physicsguyman from fixing the fact that I keep getting my head stuck in the ceiling when waking up. Also, who cares how pretty something looks if it is amazing to play? I know I don't and that's been the mantra of gamers for years now:
our games look good but the gameplay has suffered because of it Nevertheless, Elite looks great, and if you like high sci-fi comic style art NMS is right up your alley and they improve the fidelities with each update. There comes a point where throwing more triangles at a game doesn't make it better, it just makes it take longer. SC is the poster child for this. Further, their need to have the "prettiest game" out there caused them to choose an engine ill suited to their task and has caused the game to enter a development quagmire it may never recover from.
The only FPS/Vehicle/Space/Flight/Planet/Station game! Space Engineers. Done, thanks. Seriously, it does all of it, gets updated much quicker. Of course you can complain about the voxels and the graphics but again that doesn't matter if you can't release your product and the graphics aren't making the game better. SC's graphics actively make the game worse. Of course, you can say that still, SE isn't out of early access and see, these games take time. Yeah they do, but not as long or needing as much of your money as CIG are claiming SC does. To further hammer the point home, a good portion of these other games I listed that do the things CIG and their defenders claim are "never before done" and "incredibly difficult" didn't have the audacity to ask for peoples money upfront before it was playable and one of them is free. If CIG were smart they'd have contacted Vladimir and asked to license Space Engine for their new space game instead of a small map FPS engine. The extra bonus is they wouldn't be getting sued by Crytek right now.
Furthermore, it doesn't really matter if it hasn't all been done in one place before. The point is it has been done before, numerous times, often separately to varying degrees of success. The pitfalls of proc gen, for example, are well understood. The time and effort of building the same scale of assets from hand are also well understood. The basics of multiple physics grids and vehicles and switching from them to FPS are ideas the industry understands and knows how to work with. Decent flight models have been hashed out by other companies. CIG is acting like they are breaking new ground and working through never before seen problems with a team of experts but the reality is they are bumbling through well known gaming headaches like newcomers and botching nearly every step while spending your money to do it and always asking for more while having such a poor understanding of what they are doing that they promise release dates years and possibly decades before actual launch.
Last part of this section: we compare what SC does to what other games do. We do not compare what SC dreams of one day doing with what other games currently do because that's silly. Until CIG can demonstrate they are capable of putting "dream SC" together we can't talk about how "complex" it's quantum-future-self is when the right-now software itself is a barely stitched together hack of Lumberyard the devs haven't yet figured out how to make work. Comparing 3.0 to any of it's completion reveals it to be nothing short of a hilarious joke and a failure.
Furthermore, CR can't shake his old bad habits. Like you said:
CIG want most of what ED will have in future content, to be at release.
This is hilariously awful because desperately trying to cram every new feature that catches the project manager's eye means the idea of a 1.0 will never be set. You need to come up with a product and what state you want it to be at and then release the damn thing before adding more to it. Elite did it right, they got their product out and now have something to keep adding too.
Meanwhile, you say that CIG wants everything Elite has now and may have in the future at launch, but five years from now when they are finishing up Elite may be an entirely different game with features CR never dreamed up and now they need to shoehorn that in too along with cool features from twelve other games that came out that impressed him and if he doesn't add them in it'll not be the "BDSSE" that does "everything" because some other game is doing something SC isn't.
Your defense of SC is, sorry to say, literally the reason it's such a joke and a failure to those of us here who have an understanding of "how game development works."
