The amount of work in SC is mahoosive, its already vastly bigger than anything i have ever seen,, its taken me several hundreds of hours to white-box this out, and it is just a crude white-box model, months of my free time, a Carrack is hundreds if not thousands of times more work and that's just one of over 100 ships, and the ships are a tiny fraction of the total work in the game.
Unless you can appreciate that, with respect
You don't know what you're talking about.
There's no doubt about the
amount of work SC has done. The doubt comes in when you consider whether it's nearly half a billion dollars and about ten million person-hours of work.
Because from what I've seen of SC so far, both in-game and on streams, I don't see
that much results from the time and money sunk into this project. Primarily because they are not at a stage of develop where they
should be putting that much time and money into art assets, because they've only
now figured out that a core system won't work as they want it to, a core system that wasn't complete in the first place, and are having to
redo that core... and that means more work will need to be redone on
everything that core system interacts with.
CIG's development very much reminds me of something that drives me up the wall at work. Many of our stockers believe in
looking productive, and not
being productive, which means they hide overstock on the sales floor so that they've "killed a pallet", rather than process that overstock correctly. Processing that overstock
correctly is actually faster
for them, and down the road saves a
lot more effort.
Because correcting inventory errors
immediately prevents more overstock coming in the future, clogging up our back room, and making
everything more difficult.
But because they're giving our supervisors the
illusion of productivity, it means that those errors don't get fixed. It also exacerbates the problem, because that hidden overstock could further exacerbate the problem because it won't get counted during the occasional verification checks, it may get counted as the item its hidden behind (usually they're behind similar items) leading to an inflated onhand and thus lost sales (which is what usually triggers verification checks),
and of course once found,
it needs to be repackaged and put in the back room.
Where it
should've gone in the first place, and would've been removed long ago, if they had done things the
right way.
Because CIG wants the
illusion of a working AAA space MMO, as opposed to doing the
right thing to actually
make a AAA space MMO, they've wasted nearly half a billion dollars, and are being outdone by tiny studios that count themselves lucky if they can raise a million dollars. Not in the
art department, certainly, but in the gameplay department, the AI department, the networking department, and pretty much every other category that matters to anyone for whom visuals are a minor concern.
Why doesn't CIG do it the
right way? Because Roberts discovered with the Kickstarter that by lying through impressive looking machinima videos done "in engine" brings in a
lot of cash, and if CIG's UK company reflect the whole, the Roberts clan is siphoning away at
least a tithe of all income.
