Star Citizen Discussions v7

McGlashan

McGlashan
MTBFritz said:
What POSSIBLE motivation does Chris Roberts have to actually deliver a game at all besides being an upright and honest character who stays to his word?
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None at all. All of his crowing about evil publishers leaves him with nowhere to shift the blame when (not if) SC turns out to not be the genre-defining masterpiece his fanatics have been imagining since 2012. The various criticisms of ED, no matter how valid, are only able exist because the game has concrete systems in place. With 3.0 Roberts is running out of excuses for why SC has no such systems at all. It was amusing in that recent (alleged) avocado leak that noob testers were chastised for trying to "play the build" rather than test the specific issues that CIG directed them to concentrate on. 3.0 was supposed to be the patch that introduced some valid game play, but it seems they're still struggling to get core technology to function. The upside for Roberts is that as long as he doesn't have to lock down any game mechanics, the whales can continue to project their own dreams onto the game, and pony up accordingly.

Remember the classic golf swing scanner mechanic. That's the sort of level of quality we can expect when vaguely-defined features like "ship repairs", "multi-crew", "exploration" etc are eventually reduced to actual button pushing. It's not going to be pretty, assuming it ever happens.
 

dayrth

Volunteer Moderator
dayrth
Frank said:
I know a lot of FDevs keep their eye on this thread, I know that Elite has nothing to do with Star Wars, and I know that Frontier might need to pay a lot of money to Disney for this, but could we please have Jar Jar Binks as a killable character?
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If we have to have Binks as a character, he better bleedin' well be killable.
 
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Vasea Azure

Vasea Azure
Its page 11 already?! Wow, for a non existent game SC is actually doing pretty good here! Anyway I try to follow/read all of their emails and announcements, but it all feels so all over the place or focused on less important stuff that I cant really put my mind on where the project is currently heading. To be honest with ya, its like they want to milk up ship sales for as long as its humanly possible before they show what they got - and thats not too much I can assume. And its sad how ppl who are unaware about what is going on posibly are getting tricked in to buying this - just look at 3.0, if I were new to this I would scream in joy and throw my money at them.
 

Neo-ST

Neo-ST
TenakaFurey said:
Finances is easy....he didn't.

He started developing SC on his own with a fairly small team. At that time, SC was to be more of a WC successor in style.

But publishers weren't interested, and that is why he went to Kickstarter. Like FD with Elite, he wanted to show that there was sufficient interest to support his game.

But while he wasn't able to persuade publishers about SC, he was able to sell his dream to ordinary players.

I don't think anyone ever said he was a poor salesman.

As for the engine...in his defence, there were SOME mitigating factors.

His own team was small. As HG showed with their engine for NMS, that isn't necessarily a problem - they wrote an engine for NMS that is capable of doing a lot of what CR wants SC to do, but NMS also has a very different focus and (I presume) feel.

But SC at that time was much more limited in scope and ambition, and CRs business plan looks like it involved sending huge parts of the game to be developed by third party contractors.

A lot of devs would "tweak" the game engine anyway and buying off the shelf would...in theory...save him a lot of time and effort and allow him to parcel out individual modules to third parties. Just as he did with Ilfonic.

There is nothing really unusual or weird about that - other FPS engines have also managed space and flight combat. His choice was suboptimal...but doable.

But...the crowdfunding was a **little** bit more successful than planned. CR got ambitious. He started adding features and upping the scale. The game morphed from a space combat sim a la Wing Commander into a MMO.

CR had originally planned a WC style game. CE might not have been perfect but it could have been tweaked. There was no need for subsumption AI...rudimentary netcode would have worked...a 32 bit environment would have provided enough room and so on.

That isn't where Star Citizens current problems began.

CR wasn't creating a WC style game anymore which meant a lot of the planning he did for the game, planning for a WC style successor, was now worthless. Any feasibility studies or prototypes simply weren't applicable anymore.

Did he have another set in place for the MMO? Did he redo them for the new game he was creating?

I'd like to think so. I suspect he didn't and that he is just winging it.

But anyway...CE likely could have worked for his original vision and it offered a number of advantages. It was well known, an industry standard, lots of people could have worked with it and it looked pretty.

But once you started talking about requiring substantial networking links...requiring AI suited for an MMO and universe simulator...requiring a 64 bit system to house the universe....and more, you end up talking about massive changes to the core engine.

Changes that mean his plan to farm content out to third parties wasn't going to work anymore.

That he still went ahead and hired third parties to develop aspects of the game, and then set about updating the game engine without telling them...a mistake which cost millions and squandered years of work...says a lot about CRs fitness to lead.

Chris Roberts big mistake was in deciding to keep CryEngine and modify it rather than abandoning it and creating a custom engine once he changed the style of game from space sim to MMO life simulator.
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Well put, I think anyone with a brain would agree. Except SC white knights, they still think CE was the best choice.
Anyway, I agree that he could have put out SQ42 using CE.

But developing a new custom engine? With CR at the helm? Forget about it. I bet he knows it too. He's having trouble modding an already made engine (CE), let alone building a new one.
 

lysan

lysan
Dooguk said:
First they tell them to "Take as long as you want" So they did now it's " Oh this game is never coming out, I wish they would hurry up"

Derek Smart and others told them ages ago what was going to happen. Did they listen? He said they could never make this game for less than £150m.

He was right.
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Please hurry up slowly then :)
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Vasea Azure said:
Its page 11 already?! Wow, for a non existent game SC is actually doing pretty good here! Anyway I try to follow/read all of their emails and announcements, but it all feels so all over the place or focused on less important stuff that I cant really put my mind on where the project is currently heading. To be honest with ya, its like they want to milk up ship sales for as long as its humanly possible before they show what they got - and thats not too much I can assume. And its sad how ppl who are unaware about what is going on posibly are getting tricked in to buying this - just look at 3.0, if I were new to this I would scream in joy and throw my money at them.
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That is why adults dont pre-order an already funded game. I feel sorry for a twelve year old spending the $40 he saved for weeks and months for.

Adults spending hundreds? Thats on them.
 

Marak

Marak
Anyone else here think that Chris is just postponing the inevitable?

Or do you reckon he still believes he can still achieve what he's promised?
 

Vasea Azure

Vasea Azure
Marak said:
Anyone else here think that Chris is just postponing the inevitable?

Or do you reckon he still believes he can still achieve what he's promised?
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I will be honest and bluntly say - I think there is a possibility that they hit the wall with the engine limitations and indeed have nothing. And huge trouble with fixing the issue and cobbling game parts all together further on. I do think the project is in serious technical trouble judging by all the bread crumbs we saw last year. We might be witnessing beginning of the true end of this slow mo train crash. [down] I still have tiny tiny hope of being prove wrong with the upcoming 3.0 but.. yeah... probably not happening.
 
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Kerrash

Kerrash
Marak said:
Anyone else here think that Chris is just postponing the inevitable?

Or do you reckon he still believes he can still achieve what he's promised?
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My guess would be he is taking the only logical viable course of action he has left and steering the project into a perpetual early access cycle.
 

Marak

Marak
Vasea Azure said:
I will be honest and bluntly say - I think there is a possibility that they hit the wall with the engine limitations and indeed have nothing. And huge trouble with fixing the issue and cobbling game parts all together further on. I do think the project is in serious technical trouble judging by all the bread crumbs we saw last year. We might be witnessing beginning of the true end of this slow mo train crash. [down] I still have tiny tiny hope of being prove wrong with the upcoming 3.0 but.. yeah... probably not happening.
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Yeah - Those are my thoughts too.

I'm guessing though that if you are so heaviliy invested in a project it can be hard to accept what's really happening.

Kerrash said:
My guess would be he is taking the only logical viable course of action he has left and steering the project into a perpetual early access cycle.
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That too...
 

Cobra1984

C
Marak said:
Anyone else here think that Chris is just postponing the inevitable?

Or do you reckon he still believes he can still achieve what he's promised?
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Everyone already got a peek at their hand during gamescom. Instead of a royal flush it was the two jokers, the three of fails and a folded up refund cheque.

It's entirely up to the backers when to call time, CR will just keep doing what he's been doing.
 

Cobra1984

C
Kerrash said:
My guess would be he is taking the only logical viable course of action he has left and steering the project into a perpetual early access cycle.
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Rumour control has it that there may be a contractual arrangement pushing CIG into an 'actual' early access mode sooner rather than later.
 
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