I must admit that I've become quite interested in how CIG are managing the Star Citizen project and how it compares to ED.
When I first found out about both games - the first thing that struck me is that I very quickly had a clear idea of what ED is all about, whereas I'm still a bit unclear as to what lies at the core of SC.
I've played both Elite, Frontier and Wing Commander games in the past, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with Chris Roberts' work.
Admittedly I am more attached to the Elite franchise than Chris Robert's games (Wing Commander was a really good game - but I never felt the urge to revisit it, unlike Frontier which ate away at many adolescent hours) so perhaps I "get" Elite more easily for that reason.
But I also wander if it's because there is a clearer, more focussed vision at the heart of Elite. With Star Citizen, it feels like the game proposition is less clear...
When I read the ED home-page, there's quite a clear "elevator pitch" as to what the game is about. The Star Citizen about page, by contrast is a bit fluffy - there's lots of setting of the tone and there is some detail about features ("How the engines work", "Weapons", etc) - but there's no straightforward, one or two paragraph summary of the game.
To me, that's kind of symptomatic of the whole project, as far as I can tell. There are loads of cool little ideas (nice looking ships, ideas about ship-boarding, FPS ideas, details about ship damage) but there's no over-arching USP.. It kind of feels like a melting pot of cool space stuff.
ED has lots of features too - but it feels like they are subservient to the general vision. Feature ideas have been dismissed because - although they sound "cool" - they don't fit with the Elite vision (e.g. fleet management). To me, that's a reassuring sign since it shows that there is a clear goal for the game, and clear goals are important for keeping projects on track.
Something else that I find confusing about Star Citizen is that I've seen very early footage of Chris Roberts demoing the game, which has looked incredibly polished. But then the actual gameplay demos more recently have looked rather buggy and unpolished. Again - that is slightly worrying and in contrast to ED where early footage was a bit rough around the edges but has become markedly slicker as time goes on.
Anyway - a bit of a ramble there but I wanted to get that brain-dump out the way
Just my opinions of course.
