When you think about it, there are a great many similarities between Braben, Roberts and Murray with their 'visions' for the ultimate space sim.
All three developer heads were essentially lying to people from the beginning of their campaigns, by making impossible promises that they knew they could not keep, in order to secure funding, be it through crowdfunding or pre sales.
The differences are in the execution of their business plans, and the effectiveness of these business plans. Braben, I think, may have felt it necessary to talk about the possibility of walking around your ship and stations, simply because this was a feature being offered by the rival project Star Citizen at that time. Really, if you think about it, being able to walk around your spaceship and stations in the game of Elite Dangerous simply doesn't fit with the way things are in the game. There is the problem of the limited gameplay factor that would be added to the game not justifying the sheer volume of work required to create these virtual assets when you take into account how the game has developed over time. What we do in the game, the actions we have become accustomed to would be made really very tiring and tedious if they were made unnecessarily longer by for example; having to go to the bar and talk to some guy to get that black box retrieval mission, every, single time.
Elite, is a game that even after 5 years since it's inception at the beginning of it's development, it still in development. Star Citizen, also, is still in development after all this time, and of course surprise surprise, so is the No Mans Sky project, long after it was released. These are the similarities. These are the realities of video game development. It takes a long time to develop a computer game, and the more personnel you have, the quicker the game can be completed, but the higher your costs will be, even as game consumers we all know these things, but we are still going to be fooled when we don't know the difference between what's possible and what is impossible or highly impractical. All of this is simply the result of the Kickstarter funding system (or pre-order hype system) being applied to video game making which it may not be best suited to, for several reasons. One, the backer does not receive value for money for their purchase. Two, when it comes to contemporary video games, as we should already know, they will take a long time to be finished, and this is a major inconvenience. If you just backed a guy who designed a custom pack of Bicycle playing cards, then you get your product delivered within a few months or even weeks. If you backed some elaborate space based board game that reaches all it's stretch goals you might well have to wait a few more months for them to deliver your game, because of expected production bottlenecks which the tiny independent production company can't do anything about. But if you back a video game then you got to wait years for them to deliver. It simply isn't the best way to develop a computer game, for the consumer.
Having said this, I do think that the way Frontier Developments have gone about producing their game, and how they have involved the player base and backers, over this time is very commendable, and I can't help thinking that back in 2012 running a Kickstarter campaign would have seemed to be the most appropriate option to fund a game project because of it's buzz factor. In contrast, Star Citizen is clearly a victim of it's own success, and whether it will ever come together as a coherent functional game is difficult to say. I think perhaps the bar may need to be lowered when it comes to expectations, and the games' success will be dependent on whether or not the player base can make the necessary adjustments to adapt. No Mans Sky also, is clearly a victim of the overwhelming success of it's marketing campaign, brought about by the unnatural and highly unusual intervention of a major publisher, which we can all see had a large bearing on Murray's behavior during his numerous promotional interviews. It's Murray that gets all the grief for lying about features that he knew would be impossible to have ready for the publishers release deadline. Braben on the other hand still has some of us players asking for their space legs, and Roberts can probably do no wrong in the eyes of his most staunch supporters.
It appears as though NMS is now making a comeback, or at the very least, those pre order backers that did not ask for a refund, and decided to stick with the game to see how things would go are finding that they are slowly getting the features that they were promised, the game is fleshing out. Murray's development team are finally delivering on their promises and the game is more like a real game with more to do.
ED, I feel has reached it's peak about now, we have most of the features we are going to get, but still a few years of development time to go, so much more yet to come. What, at release genuinely was a mile wide inch deep game, now feels far more like a full game, with that spit and polish. And the good thing is, there is still more content to come. SC, I would hazard a guess, is going to get picked up cheap when the bubble finally bursts. And the publisher is going to have to remould the game, perhaps discarding much of Roberts' vision in order to create a functioning game, that players will enjoy. It will be painful, but necessary, if those awesome assets are to be saved.
Ok, that's my 1000 word submission. The question I want to pose you guys is, should I read crap like this out and record my voice to put on Youtube? Because I've got a very stupid voice, and why would anyone want to hear my stupid voice?
-Si
All three developer heads were essentially lying to people from the beginning of their campaigns, by making impossible promises that they knew they could not keep, in order to secure funding, be it through crowdfunding or pre sales.
The differences are in the execution of their business plans, and the effectiveness of these business plans. Braben, I think, may have felt it necessary to talk about the possibility of walking around your ship and stations, simply because this was a feature being offered by the rival project Star Citizen at that time. Really, if you think about it, being able to walk around your spaceship and stations in the game of Elite Dangerous simply doesn't fit with the way things are in the game. There is the problem of the limited gameplay factor that would be added to the game not justifying the sheer volume of work required to create these virtual assets when you take into account how the game has developed over time. What we do in the game, the actions we have become accustomed to would be made really very tiring and tedious if they were made unnecessarily longer by for example; having to go to the bar and talk to some guy to get that black box retrieval mission, every, single time.
Elite, is a game that even after 5 years since it's inception at the beginning of it's development, it still in development. Star Citizen, also, is still in development after all this time, and of course surprise surprise, so is the No Mans Sky project, long after it was released. These are the similarities. These are the realities of video game development. It takes a long time to develop a computer game, and the more personnel you have, the quicker the game can be completed, but the higher your costs will be, even as game consumers we all know these things, but we are still going to be fooled when we don't know the difference between what's possible and what is impossible or highly impractical. All of this is simply the result of the Kickstarter funding system (or pre-order hype system) being applied to video game making which it may not be best suited to, for several reasons. One, the backer does not receive value for money for their purchase. Two, when it comes to contemporary video games, as we should already know, they will take a long time to be finished, and this is a major inconvenience. If you just backed a guy who designed a custom pack of Bicycle playing cards, then you get your product delivered within a few months or even weeks. If you backed some elaborate space based board game that reaches all it's stretch goals you might well have to wait a few more months for them to deliver your game, because of expected production bottlenecks which the tiny independent production company can't do anything about. But if you back a video game then you got to wait years for them to deliver. It simply isn't the best way to develop a computer game, for the consumer.
Having said this, I do think that the way Frontier Developments have gone about producing their game, and how they have involved the player base and backers, over this time is very commendable, and I can't help thinking that back in 2012 running a Kickstarter campaign would have seemed to be the most appropriate option to fund a game project because of it's buzz factor. In contrast, Star Citizen is clearly a victim of it's own success, and whether it will ever come together as a coherent functional game is difficult to say. I think perhaps the bar may need to be lowered when it comes to expectations, and the games' success will be dependent on whether or not the player base can make the necessary adjustments to adapt. No Mans Sky also, is clearly a victim of the overwhelming success of it's marketing campaign, brought about by the unnatural and highly unusual intervention of a major publisher, which we can all see had a large bearing on Murray's behavior during his numerous promotional interviews. It's Murray that gets all the grief for lying about features that he knew would be impossible to have ready for the publishers release deadline. Braben on the other hand still has some of us players asking for their space legs, and Roberts can probably do no wrong in the eyes of his most staunch supporters.
It appears as though NMS is now making a comeback, or at the very least, those pre order backers that did not ask for a refund, and decided to stick with the game to see how things would go are finding that they are slowly getting the features that they were promised, the game is fleshing out. Murray's development team are finally delivering on their promises and the game is more like a real game with more to do.
ED, I feel has reached it's peak about now, we have most of the features we are going to get, but still a few years of development time to go, so much more yet to come. What, at release genuinely was a mile wide inch deep game, now feels far more like a full game, with that spit and polish. And the good thing is, there is still more content to come. SC, I would hazard a guess, is going to get picked up cheap when the bubble finally bursts. And the publisher is going to have to remould the game, perhaps discarding much of Roberts' vision in order to create a functioning game, that players will enjoy. It will be painful, but necessary, if those awesome assets are to be saved.
Ok, that's my 1000 word submission. The question I want to pose you guys is, should I read crap like this out and record my voice to put on Youtube? Because I've got a very stupid voice, and why would anyone want to hear my stupid voice?
-Si
