No, I don't think they've
tried to. That's part of the problem. Chris Roberts is far too focused on making his visual spectacle that he hasn't even invested the necessary pre-development work on figuring out
how what he wants to accomplish can be done... or even
if it can be done.
Nope, I don't think they've given it their
best shot.
Their
best shot would've been doing the necessary prototyping and testing
before taking people's money, and adjusting their ambitions according to those results. And no, a machinima video made by
other people does
not qualify as a pre-Alpha "prototype," no matter how much Chris Roberts pretended otherwise, during his Kickstarter campaign.
Their
best shot would've been developing their core game loops and technologies
before hiring hundreds of artists to flesh out their universe. Lets not even get into paying for
A-List Actors (most of them not even
professional voice actors) to do
mocap in their
custom made motion capture studio of all things. Doing the latter
first is why most of what Chris Roberts had captured has become unusable, and needed to be redone... at the
very expensive UK-based Imaginarium, rather than at a mocap studio in LA where Chris Roberts, CIG's primary development studio,
and the actors he'd hired all lived. Which doesn't make a
lot of sense in hindsight, considering how much money Chris Roberts spent on making his own mocap studio in the first place.
(Oh, right... Chris Roberts was living out his rockstar Hollywood Director fantasies with other people's money again.)
So no, I don't think they've given it their best shot. What they've done is, as you said:
Making Chris Roberts' "dream game" became a tertiary concern once he realized how much money was rolling in by selling concepts, rather than a released game.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tpvxsJAZPk&ab_channel=MadonnaHistory
