I would have to disagree here. SC is an example of the need to be careful with crowd funding. Without crowd funding there would be no Elite Dangerous.
Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12
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It's also an example of why feature creep needs to be avoided at all costs, and why ambitious dreamers like Chris "This is still early stage stuff" Roberts need to be kept away from project management.
Elite Dangerous fan, and long time Star Citizen fan here, backed in Feb 2013.
Without wanting to throw a grenade into this, what do people here actually think of Star Citizen? i like both these games, i don't see them as competitors, they are different enough that there is room for both.
I'll give an explanation of what i think of it laterit has its good points and its bad points.
What I think about Star Citizen is that it started off with good intentions but I refuse to believe those involved, especially CR have not seen the writing on the wall. This game will never be made with all the ideas they have sold to people, it will never have 100 systems with all these wonderful unique cities, it will never have mechanics like they have detailed, it will never have missions or an economy like they claimed, it will never be even 20% of what they claimed. They know this, they know that all the time and money in the world will not make this game and yet they happily let people throw good money after bad.
That makes it an outright scam in my eyes.
Had you seen the infamous imgur album of quotes and what do you think about it?Elite Dangerous fan, and long time Star Citizen fan here, backed in Feb 2013.
Without wanting to throw a grenade into this, what do people here actually think of Star Citizen? i like both these games, i don't see them as competitors, they are different enough that there is room for both.
I'll give an explanation of what i think of it later
Source: https://imgur.com/a/P9PZSNw
As i said i don't think ED and SC are in competition.
I was attracted to the pitch back in 2012, a go anywhere, do anything first person space game.
Even that evolved into something much more, every conceivable game mechanic with a second life type personal journey, a bit like Eve Online but with the missing component of having actually fully fleshed out landing zones, space stations and personal ships, it still amazes me that even now the game has ships that are 200 meters long with completely fully fleshed out first person interiors, and there are much bigger ones waiting in the wings, you do get a much greater immersive sense from your ship being a complete 3D representation, to take it somewhere, get out of your chair, walk through it and get out to where you have taken it. What's not to like?
Add to that the mind-boggling attention to detail in all that, have any of you guys walked around an 890J, a Hammerhead, a Carrack? it is mind blowing what they have done. Some of these ships have interiors that are like entire level maps in First Person Shooters.
The game has mission mechanics in operation, mining, cargo hauling, space postman, trading, PVP, AI battles in space and on foot, some of them are clunky, buggy, but i enjoy them.
For example.
But i fully acknowledge the game has been in development for a long time, too long, and its no where near complete, in fact they haven't even fully finished the first and only star system yet, the roadmap suggests Pyro and Nyx Star Systems at the end of this year but we shall see, plenty has been delayed already.
You do have to ask will it ever be finished?
I have logged thousands of hours in Star Citizen over the years, and i still enjoy it, everything new that comes to it with every patch is adding stuff to a game i already enjoy.
I also see a lot of people with [CMDR] prefixes in their names in the live global chat, clearly others from around here also think its doesn't have to be one or the other, why not both?
We are all just space nerds.
I'll leave it here for now with what is recently one of my favourite videos from a Star Citizen player, the game has a very good cinematic camera built in and some people have to skill to put it to wonderful effect.
I was attracted to the pitch back in 2012, a go anywhere, do anything first person space game.
Even that evolved into something much more, every conceivable game mechanic with a second life type personal journey, a bit like Eve Online but with the missing component of having actually fully fleshed out landing zones, space stations and personal ships, it still amazes me that even now the game has ships that are 200 meters long with completely fully fleshed out first person interiors, and there are much bigger ones waiting in the wings, you do get a much greater immersive sense from your ship being a complete 3D representation, to take it somewhere, get out of your chair, walk through it and get out to where you have taken it. What's not to like?
Add to that the mind-boggling attention to detail in all that, have any of you guys walked around an 890J, a Hammerhead, a Carrack? it is mind blowing what they have done. Some of these ships have interiors that are like entire level maps in First Person Shooters.
The game has mission mechanics in operation, mining, cargo hauling, space postman, trading, PVP, AI battles in space and on foot, some of them are clunky, buggy, but i enjoy them.
For example.
But i fully acknowledge the game has been in development for a long time, too long, and its no where near complete, in fact they haven't even fully finished the first and only star system yet, the roadmap suggests Pyro and Nyx Star Systems at the end of this year but we shall see, plenty has been delayed already.
You do have to ask will it ever be finished?
I have logged thousands of hours in Star Citizen over the years, and i still enjoy it, everything new that comes to it with every patch is adding stuff to a game i already enjoy.
I also see a lot of people with [CMDR] prefixes in their names in the live global chat, clearly others from around here also think its doesn't have to be one or the other, why not both?
We are all just space nerds.
I'll leave it here for now with what is recently one of my favourite videos from a Star Citizen player, the game has a very good cinematic camera built in and some people have to skill to put it to wonderful effect.
The roadmap doesn't suggest Pyro or Nyx are arriving at the end of this year, because they won't be - CIG have already said that Server Meshing is needed for a second star system to be added, and even the first iteration of that tech won't be ready by the end of the year.
Elite Dangerous fan, and long time Star Citizen fan here, backed in Feb 2013.
Without wanting to throw a grenade into this, what do people here actually think of Star Citizen? i like both these games, i don't see them as competitors, they are different enough that there is room for both.
I'll give an explanation of what i think of it later
I'll break my response down.
Original Premise: A single player campaign (that you could do drop in drop out multiplayer with friends) that after completion would open up into the full multiplayer universe and also host your own private servers sounded like an ambitious but superb idea. However, some of the claims made early on were very eyebrow raising from the scope vs the budget they claimed they needed as well as some extremely aggressive timelines for release. However, they showed off a very nice demo of the game and strongly implied it was work they had already done... this turned out to be not true.
Stretch Goals: This is when the red flags really started to be raised. The amounts asked vs what they promised to deliver for that money made zero sense. It was like they were just making up numbers and stuff to add for those numbers.
65 million project: It had ballooned from a 5.5 million best damn space sim ever to a 65 million even better damn space sim ever, and yet, they seemed to be lacking a coherent plan for delivery. The project was now being largely funded by the sale of ships, raising the spectre of pay to win and the scope had balooned beyond recognition. At this point they were still claiming they could do it in just a few years and were still talking about a 2015 release date for what was now the separate SQ42 single player campaign and heavily implying SC wasn't far behind in terms of release. Answer the Call.
Current state: Still lacking in core features and a very buggy alpha with somewhere in the region of 500 million dollars raised, and they still haven't delivered on the content they said they could for 5.5 million in 2-3 years. Its now 9 years later. Yes, it looks pretty, many games do. Yes, it has some nice features (when they work). But its still just got one incomplete system out over 110 sold to backers, not to mention all the other stretch goals they promised, many of which are still not implemented. The only consistent thing is the ship pipeline, which has also grown like a monster.
Chris Roberts, his history: A lot of people backed SC based on the fact that it was Chris Roberts who was doing the kickstarter. They remember his earlier games and thought that he could achieve his vision. Problem is, when you look at his history there is a common thread. Overly ambitious projects that fail to deliver on what was planned. After Strike Commander CR acknowledge that he tried to do more than was possible. And again, with Freelancer, he promised effectively the Best Damn Space Sim Ever, but as the deadline was approaching, it turned out that they hadn't got a working game and it was still missing a lot of features that would have set it apart from other space sims. Microsoft stepping in, effectively buying CR out, giving him "Special Thanks" on the credits, and it still took them 2 more years to get a decent game released that was still a long way from what was announced it would be. There's a lot more to it than this, and there is a really good article about CR and his history called the Chris Roberts Theory of Everything. Its a fascinating insight into how CR works and it includes a lot of quotes from CR himself and people who have worked with him.
See: https://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-roberts-theory-of-everything/
CIG, development, and project management: CIG upper management is staffed with family, old associates, and cronies. Many of whom are from the old school days of software development where you got a few clever guys together and pushed out a game. It seems most of them never really learned how to do Agile development (or any other methodology for that matter). There have been a number of red flags project management-wise over the years that would explain why the game is still in the state it is in. I could go on more about this, but this post is getting big enough already. However, a look at the various roadmaps CIG have had over the years, the constant slippage of items that were slated to come not appearing, and most stark, their absoloute refusal to talk about release dates most of the time, probably because every time they have discussed release dates, those dates went by, by months, and eventually years.
Lies, damn lies, and marketing: For me, this is one of the main issues i have with CIG and why i'll probably not buy the game even if they do release a half decent space sim at the end. CIG have consistently lied to or mislead backers from day 1. From the highly misrepresentative launch video, which turned out to have been created by Crytek to CIG's claims of the current state of the game, year after year, when it turned out to be not true. Chris, Sandi, and Erin all stated in 2014 and 2015 that SQ42 was nearly finished and Chapter 1 would release in 2015. It didn't. It still hasn't released, 6 years later. It still doesn't have a release date. They must have known it was nowhere near ready for release. And if you look at what is required for SQ42 to release, we can see from CIG's own roadmaps them working on things required for SQ42 in 2018 and beyond... so how could SQ42 be almost ready for release if they didn't get around working on tech and content for it until many years later? And there are other statements, such as CR in 2015 saying that by the end of 2015 backers would get everything they had pledged for. That would have been both SQ42 and SC with 110 systems with all the other features that CIG to that point had promised backers. That was simply a bald faced lie. Then you have the spaceship sales, which have been discussed plenty. FOMO is rife. Limited numbers of certain ships. LTI only coming with certain ships. Warbond sales. And more. And of course, they grey market, which CIG have facilitated by making things work as they do.
Similarity with other projects: There are common threads between certain crowdfunded games that fail to release or release in a much worse state than backers were led to hope for. Grand claims of what will be produced. Massive scope. Never been done before! Often a single charismatic figure at the lead who talks a lot about what will be achieved within a relatively short amount of time with a relatively small budget, because they are so great, they can do it, while greedy publishers will take more money and more time to deliver the same. And as the project goes on, and they show off plenty of fancy looking stuff, somehow things just don't come together. They might release something playable, and of course, its alpha, which provides a nice excuse for why there are problems. ITS ALPHA! But don't worry, everything will be much better when its finished. Just ignore the problems for now, you're just testing it anyway. However, unlike other public alphas, these alphas never seem to come to an end. They developers keep asking for more money. Just a bit more is needed. Once the next bit is done, things will really start to come together. They start to monetize more things. Bigger, better, or different. And the requests for funding never stop. Those who pledge the most get special status and of course, in-game benefits (at least, in theory). The money raised sometimes being tens or even hundreds times more than was originally stated as being needed... and yes, the scope may have increased, but they still don't deliver on the scope of the game they initially promised.
See: Shroud of the Avatar and Chronicles of Elyria
What will be the outcome?: Really hard to say as despite all the red flags in relation to the project there are still plenty of people willing to continue giving CIG money. However, i will state that it is my firm belief that backers will never get the game they paid for. Not even close. Not even if they give CIG another 10 years and another 500 million dollars. CIG have sold backers dreams, and that is all it will ever be. Even if CIG had competent leadership, i'm doubtful anyone could deliver on what CIG sold to backers. Not just the 65 million dollars stretch goal, but the 1000+ times Chris said "yes" to questions on 10 For the Chairman. Will there be a decent space game released eventually? Maybe... possibly. Give CIG another few years, and if there is enough pressure, from Calders or perhaps financial, they may be pushed to put a release label on what they have, polish it, and hope for the best. They might have a few systems by then and a more more working gameplay loops.
However, no matter what they release, they will find themselves facing certain criticisms, the first will be something like "how many hundreds of million and how many years for this?". They have simply squandered too much time and too much money to produce anything less than the BDSSE. But, its not going to be the BDSSE. That ship sailed a long time ago. The second criticism will be along the lines of "this isn't what was paid for". Again, i refer back to CIGs statements about what they game will be like, 10FtC, Inside Star Citizen, Pillar Talk, Reverse the Verse, and all their other marketing videos where the talking heads talked about what they were doing to the game and what they were adding.
People backed the game based on what they were told they were doing, because they trusted CIG, they believed in the "open development".
But, i'm not sure they will ever dare to put a release label on SC. They will call it early access or something, and then keep that going for years, while they slowly increment numbers without calling it a release. SQ42 they do have to release at some point though... and assuming they can get it into a releasable form, i think it will be an interesting indicator showing what sort of game CIG can produce.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, if someone hasn't already posted it for you and you haven't already seen it, i highly recommend the Sunk Cost Galaxy series by Bootcha, an ex-investor in Star Citizen (note, investor, not backer - this was early days when CR was scrounging together much smaller sums than he has now in order to make the game, before he learned people will give you lots of money for pictures of spaceships and dreams.txt).
The only negative about this YT series is that its development speed is on a par with SC's
I think you summarize it quite nicely. The dream is nice, as dreams often are. The reality is a different matter. Problem is, the faithful backers live in the dreamworld and so does Chris Roberts and his Merry Men.
CIG have a habit of suggesting things though that then fail to materialize.
Remember, farming and salvage were on the roadmap in 2016.
Yeah we were talking about Pyro just the other day. When noting that literally none of the new technologies (and only one of the feature additions) planned for 2020 actually made it. Pyro, iCache, ToW, etc etc. None of them made it...
Pillar Talk - Looking Into 2020: A Prediction Check...
This video was dedicated to features coming in 2020. IE:
(NB the footage itself was filmed at Citcon in 2019, so when they say 'next year' periodically throughout the video, they mean 2020, and this is clear in context.)
- Intro: "This is a conversation about what will be coming beyond 3.8. So 3.9, 4.0, and potentially beyond."
- Outro: "There you go, that's a fairly in-depth discussion of what's coming up this year."
Did these features get released in 2020?:
NO:
* iCache.
* Making a homestead on a planet. Deploying defences etc. Tony Z says other players would be able to destroy, or customise such bases, because "that's what we do so often". They "build in the fundamental mechanics, and then you get all of this complex functionality that naturally results.".
* "Persistence for resources" on planets etc, leading to finite caps and gold rushes, for 3.9. Essentially brings exploration.
* Background Universe simulation. The resource exploration feeds into that. "The thing that you're working on Tony, that we're running".
* Jump points & a new solar system. Sean was glad they showed it at Citcon and was very excited for 2020 on those grounds. Tony Z was excited by the discovery, mapping and economic impact of the various types of jump point.
* Pyro specifically, with its lawlessness etc. (Chris qualifies Pyro as not coming in 3.9, but after that, and some time in 2020.).
* Refuelling and salvage. (Originally roadmapped for 2017 etc).
* Theatres of War. Coming out in 2020, but not with 3.8.
YES:
* Prisons in 3.9.
---
So 4.0 became 3.10. We're now on the (delayed) 3.13 in Q2 2021. Outside of prisons, literally none of the planned things they mentioned are in...
Where art thou miracle techs? With your tsunami of emergent gameplay?
(Like purely on iCache, which started this deep dive: I get that a database that handles 'billions' of items and allows many servers to access it robustly is no small task ultimately. But still..... What a load of perpetual chaff they come out with :/)
And some of them are already numerous years late... (jump points were first supposed to arrive in 2017 for example...)
It all screams massive developmental disarray.
They add the easy stuff, but the hard stuff so rarely makes it through the door. (And the easy stuff is so often ‘tier 0' to start with, and slowly ends up in neglected disarray on the floor).
The question for many is: Why SC?
Why give money to these guys, who are clearly far from trustworthy all told? Why invest your time in a perpetual alpha, which will doubtless be sketchy and incomplete for years to come, at best?
It’s cool that you have fun in the alpha/game. Good luck to you.
But don’t expect to entice anyone in this thread with tales of marvellous ship assets and buggy routines
. Plenty here play as it is, and the rest are a long way from being swayed by the various pros it has managed to accrue. The backdrop of prolonged mismanagement catching up with them just looms too large. It’s one giant present and future 'con' for the entire project.(I’ll consider it when they get VR working
)
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I'll break my response down.
Original Premise: A single player campaign (that you could do drop in drop out multiplayer with friends) that after completion would open up into the full multiplayer universe and also host your own private servers sounded like an ambitious but superb idea. However, some of the claims made early on were very eyebrow raising from the scope vs the budget they claimed they needed as well as some extremely aggressive timelines for release. However, they showed off a very nice demo of the game and strongly implied it was work they had already done... this turned out to be not true.
Stretch Goals: This is when the red flags really started to be raised. The amounts asked vs what they promised to deliver for that money made zero sense. It was like they were just making up numbers and stuff to add for those numbers.
65 million project: It had ballooned from a 5.5 million best damn space sim ever to a 65 million even better damn space sim ever, and yet, they seemed to be lacking a coherent plan for delivery. The project was now being largely funded by the sale of ships, raising the spectre of pay to win and the scope had balooned beyond recognition. At this point they were still claiming they could do it in just a few years and were still talking about a 2015 release date for what was now the separate SQ42 single player campaign and heavily implying SC wasn't far behind in terms of release. Answer the Call.
Current state: Still lacking in core features and a very buggy alpha with somewhere in the region of 500 million dollars raised, and they still haven't delivered on the content they said they could for 5.5 million in 2-3 years. Its now 9 years later. Yes, it looks pretty, many games do. Yes, it has some nice features (when they work). But its still just got one incomplete system out over 110 sold to backers, not to mention all the other stretch goals they promised, many of which are still not implemented. The only consistent thing is the ship pipeline, which has also grown like a monster.
Chris Roberts, his history: A lot of people backed SC based on the fact that it was Chris Roberts who was doing the kickstarter. They remember his earlier games and thought that he could achieve his vision. Problem is, when you look at his history there is a common thread. Overly ambitious projects that fail to deliver on what was planned. After Strike Commander CR acknowledge that he tried to do more than was possible. And again, with Freelancer, he promised effectively the Best Damn Space Sim Ever, but as the deadline was approaching, it turned out that they hadn't got a working game and it was still missing a lot of features that would have set it apart from other space sims. Microsoft stepping in, effectively buying CR out, giving him "Special Thanks" on the credits, and it still took them 2 more years to get a decent game released that was still a long way from what was announced it would be. There's a lot more to it than this, and there is a really good article about CR and his history called the Chris Roberts Theory of Everything. Its a fascinating insight into how CR works and it includes a lot of quotes from CR himself and people who have worked with him.
See: https://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-roberts-theory-of-everything/
CIG, development, and project management: CIG upper management is staffed with family, old associates, and cronies. Many of whom are from the old school days of software development where you got a few clever guys together and pushed out a game. It seems most of them never really learned how to do Agile development (or any other methodology for that matter). There have been a number of red flags project management-wise over the years that would explain why the game is still in the state it is in. I could go on more about this, but this post is getting big enough already. However, a look at the various roadmaps CIG have had over the years, the constant slippage of items that were slated to come not appearing, and most stark, their absoloute refusal to talk about release dates most of the time, probably because every time they have discussed release dates, those dates went by, by months, and eventually years.
Lies, damn lies, and marketing: For me, this is one of the main issues i have with CIG and why i'll probably not buy the game even if they do release a half decent space sim at the end. CIG have consistently lied to or mislead backers from day 1. From the highly misrepresentative launch video, which turned out to have been created by Crytek to CIG's claims of the current state of the game, year after year, when it turned out to be not true. Chris, Sandi, and Erin all stated in 2014 and 2015 that SQ42 was nearly finished and Chapter 1 would release in 2015. It didn't. It still hasn't released, 6 years later. It still doesn't have a release date. They must have known it was nowhere near ready for release. And if you look at what is required for SQ42 to release, we can see from CIG's own roadmaps them working on things required for SQ42 in 2018 and beyond... so how could SQ42 be almost ready for release if they didn't get around working on tech and content for it until many years later? And there are other statements, such as CR in 2015 saying that by the end of 2015 backers would get everything they had pledged for. That would have been both SQ42 and SC with 110 systems with all the other features that CIG to that point had promised backers. That was simply a bald faced lie. Then you have the spaceship sales, which have been discussed plenty. FOMO is rife. Limited numbers of certain ships. LTI only coming with certain ships. Warbond sales. And more. And of course, they grey market, which CIG have facilitated by making things work as they do.
Similarity with other projects: There are common threads between certain crowdfunded games that fail to release or release in a much worse state than backers were led to hope for. Grand claims of what will be produced. Massive scope. Never been done before! Often a single charismatic figure at the lead who talks a lot about what will be achieved within a relatively short amount of time with a relatively small budget, because they are so great, they can do it, while greedy publishers will take more money and more time to deliver the same. And as the project goes on, and they show off plenty of fancy looking stuff, somehow things just don't come together. They might release something playable, and of course, its alpha, which provides a nice excuse for why there are problems. ITS ALPHA! But don't worry, everything will be much better when its finished. Just ignore the problems for now, you're just testing it anyway. However, unlike other public alphas, these alphas never seem to come to an end. They developers keep asking for more money. Just a bit more is needed. Once the next bit is done, things will really start to come together. They start to monetize more things. Bigger, better, or different. And the requests for funding never stop. Those who pledge the most get special status and of course, in-game benefits (at least, in theory). The money raised sometimes being tens or even hundreds times more than was originally stated as being needed... and yes, the scope may have increased, but they still don't deliver on the scope of the game they initially promised.
See: Shroud of the Avatar and Chronicles of Elyria
What will be the outcome?: Really hard to say as despite all the red flags in relation to the project there are still plenty of people willing to continue giving CIG money. However, i will state that it is my firm belief that backers will never get the game they paid for. Not even close. Not even if they give CIG another 10 years and another 500 million dollars. CIG have sold backers dreams, and that is all it will ever be. Even if CIG had competent leadership, i'm doubtful anyone could deliver on what CIG sold to backers. Not just the 65 million dollars stretch goal, but the 1000+ times Chris said "yes" to questions on 10 For the Chairman. Will there be a decent space game released eventually? Maybe... possibly. Give CIG another few years, and if there is enough pressure, from Calders or perhaps financial, they may be pushed to put a release label on what they have, polish it, and hope for the best. They might have a few systems by then and a more more working gameplay loops.
However, no matter what they release, they will find themselves facing certain criticisms, the first will be something like "how many hundreds of million and how many years for this?". They have simply squandered too much time and too much money to produce anything less than the BDSSE. But, its not going to be the BDSSE. That ship sailed a long time ago. The second criticism will be along the lines of "this isn't what was paid for". Again, i refer back to CIGs statements about what they game will be like, 10FtC, Inside Star Citizen, Pillar Talk, Reverse the Verse, and all their other marketing videos where the talking heads talked about what they were doing to the game and what they were adding.
People backed the game based on what they were told they were doing, because they trusted CIG, they believed in the "open development".
But, i'm not sure they will ever dare to put a release label on SC. They will call it early access or something, and then keep that going for years, while they slowly increment numbers without calling it a release. SQ42 they do have to release at some point though... and assuming they can get it into a releasable form, i think it will be an interesting indicator showing what sort of game CIG can produce.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, if someone hasn't already posted it for you and you haven't already seen it, i highly recommend the Sunk Cost Galaxy series by Bootcha, an ex-investor in Star Citizen (note, investor, not backer - this was early days when CR was scrounging together much smaller sums than he has now in order to make the game, before he learned people will give you lots of money for pictures of spaceships and dreams.txt).
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU3uEBUBIEA&list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E
The only negative about this YT series is that its development speed is on a par with SC's
I don't disagree with any of that, tho to be fair in 2014 CR ran a poll explaining that he had the finances to expend the scope of the game greatly but it would take a lot longer to produce, the community agreed to this, that is no excuse and the time it is actually taking does bring a lot of difficult questions for CR, i don't think anyone who agreed to CR extending its scope back then had anything like this long in mind.
However its not the first game to take a decade + to make and it wont be the last, ED started in 2012 and we are only just now getting the First Person element of it, and its DLC, and even that you don't actually have real ships in the same sense, it is just a flying shell with a cockpit facade. everything in ED is procedurally generated and it looks it, there is nothing on any celestial surface.
He is trying to make a game that is unrealistic, but i would rather someone try and fail and get something at least even if it falls short of its promised scope than not try at all.
Ahem.....
Letter from the Chairman 17 September 2013 - The first poll.
Chris Roberts: "Finally there is one very important element – the more funds we can raise in the pre-launch phase, the more we can invest in additional content (more ships, characters etc.) and perhaps more importantly we can apply greater number of resources to the various tasks to ensure we deliver the full functionality sooner rather than later."
Letter from the Chairman 26th September 2014 - after the first poll, before the second.
Chris Roberts: "But both types of goals are carefully considered — we don’t commit to adding features that would hold up the game’s ability to go “live” in a fully functional state."
In short, Chris repeatedly told backers increasing the scope while giving them more money would not delay release.
If you tell gamers, many of whom are hopeful for something great, something new, and most not knowing the first thing about project management, if you tell them they can have more of things but it won't take any longer to deliver, how are they likely to vote?
If CIG had said "Ok, keep giving us money, we will add loads of wonderful stuff to the scope, but we won't be able to give you a release date, all we can tell you is that the game still won't be released in 2021" how do you think that vote would have gone?
And here's another thought. They stopped adding official stretch goals, but they kept taking in more money. However, they have added loads of features on their own initiative over the years without consulting backers. As long as backers kept giving them money, the scope just kept on growing, and continues to grow to this day.
It isn't just the voted themselves that are important, its how they were framed.
Ah, yes, the "community"
8% of citizens voted in the first vote and 7% in the second.
Its interesting to see how voting shifted. In the 2013 vote 88% voted yes to keeping funding going. In the 2014 vote 55% said yes. Only 3.6% of the "community" voted yes.
And for sure, highly doubtful anyone thought expanding the scope would mean no release by 2021. Hell, i was skeptical early on and still was thinking may be 2018 they would have a releasable product. And i was shouted down by the faithful for spreading FUD and being a hater for saying 2018. Turns out I wasn't negative enough!
not again please!!!
How many have spent 10 years+ in production, prior to release, and been considered a success though? Vanishingly few. Diablo 3 maybe?
That length of pre-launch toil is more associated with titles that bombed, like Duke Nukem Forever.
The distinction would be that ED has provided deliverables though. They’ve proved to date that they can do the requisite networking, persistence, core gameplay etc.
As a bonus they’ve sustained themselves primarily on the fruits of those labours, rather than persistently monetising promised future deliveries. (And so haven’t fallen foul of CIG’s issue of having to bring out new shiny ship features to outsell the last ones. Scope screep as monetisation model.)
ED has all kinds of issues with its design philosophy, for sure. And technical debt sits like a giant spider at the heart of it all. (How much will have been scrapped and redone for Odyssey? How much of their pre-sold expansion plan can their 2012 foundations really support?)
Dunno
But they at least proved a set of first principles with ED & Horizons. And may cross off some more with EDO.
SC’s problem is that they struggle to even do that. Fundamentals like the physics grid system, for example, resist fix after fix...
Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/msmdna/my_experience_with_the_fixed_lift_update/
Things that more optimistic backers assume can be resolved as a matter of course possibly can’t be. As engineers leave during the epic production phase, and Chris crashes two more impossible ideas together before breakfast. It’s quite possible that some of these core techs will never reach stability at all.
And then what can SC do? It can’t strip out all of these functions from all these pre-sold ships, can it? Can it free itself from this rod on its back, of having promised reams of complex, complementary tech, nigh a decade in advance in some cases?
Well, they might have to. But it ain’t going to be pretty if/when they do...
(To end on a happy note though, if they do stumble into a fun stripped-down sandbox game by mistake, regardless of prior promises, I’m sure plenty of people will fool around in that. If while being thankful they didn’t fund it to the tune of $450m
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I don't want to speak out of turn, as someone who knows nothing about game development, but if you are running a company that has yet to establish a record of deliverables and aren't close to finishing your original project (despite what forward-facing collateral might indicate), why the everloving frack would you leave it up to your customers to decide if the project should go bigger?
I mean, there's a big dissonance between how the two polls are remembered by backers, what the actual words were (thanks Agony), the oft-repeated line that "This is CR's vision," and "We voted to add more stuff and derail their deadlines, so it's not CR's fault that deadlines were missed, it's ours!"
I mean, there's a big dissonance between how the two polls are remembered by backers, what the actual words were (thanks Agony), the oft-repeated line that "This is CR's vision," and "We voted to add more stuff and derail their deadlines, so it's not CR's fault that deadlines were missed, it's ours!"
There is that little bit of difference that when you bought ED you got real game, not half working eternal alpha. Also you needed to fork money just about as much as any typical pay to play game wants. No pay to win mechanics. And over the time game got more stuff. Some paid for, some for free. I do not like some of things Fdev had done to this game, or has not done, but mostly it works as expected. They have done well enough to entice me to pay for newest expansion.
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We used to do that back in Rainbow Six:Rogue spear and Ghost Recon using 3d texture mods. Take a pic of your mug with a webcam and put it on your character avatar in game...so it's not a new idea. It worked just as well with Operation Flashpoint too
I remember at Codemasters some of the guys I worked with went to have their faces scanned (presumably via the Bohemian devs) for the original release of Operation Flashpoint, so I was able to kill my then boss as a Russian soldier in the single player campaign. I still have my "promo" PC copy of that game somewhere.
There is a reason for this, CiG was not an established studio, they didn't have the financial backers to make the game first and then release a finished product for people to buy.
So the idea was for backers to fund the game as its being developed and it return have access to a playable version of the game as its being developed.
This is what's happened, for the devs to make playable versions of whatever progress they have made at fixed 3 month intervals probably creates its own challenges and time resources. Bugs included.
Since Strike Commander Chris Roberts has specialised in producing more or less expensive fiasco's. Difference is that before SC he did that with publisher's money, and their wallets&patience was and is somewhat limited. But this crowdfunding&pay to win model without any oversight enables that kind behauviour for a very long time. Any professional game publisher would have pulled plug, or reined CR in many years ago.
One big basic flaw is, that they began adding superfluous stuff long before needed basic tech was in place. And they knew it. That server meshing stuff, persistence stuff, basic networking, you name it, those techs would needed to be priority stuff. Those are the foundations of the game. Not a zillion buy with real money ships, or motion capture features and so on.
Some might say that pitching big, then adding ever grander stretch goals on top, might have not been the best plan then
Yes, and several issues with this have emerged over time. One notable one is that using AAA assets while prototyping your game is an incredibly wasteful practice, and demoralising for your art teams in the process. And another is that most players don’t actually understand game dev, and will often view a prototype of functioning tech (and all the technical chat that comes with it) as proof that the tech will inevitably reach fruition.
Devs themselves know both these things pretty well. And use or avoid such techniques for selling their games, depending on their own moral stance.
I’d happily see someone repeat Chris’s fundraising feats with white box assets and a 'tech first' / 'play when it’s ready' philosophy. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen. And that’s part of the problem. Pursuing misrepresentative and wasteful practices brings the money in faster and more reliably.
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