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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

robertsspaceindustries.com

61–70 of 241 posts

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#61
post #26

Well at least this thing has reached v1.0 LOL Joke aside, I want to say something controversial here: I don't think the release date/progress matters much anymore for the dev team at this day and age. At least not as matter as it used to be when the game plan was just announced. The same point is somewhat true for their backers: they are not in a hurry as well, they want to (emotionally) see Star Citizen success one…

I don't know how you can seriously mention Freelancer without mentioning that it was completely taken out of the over-promising grip of Chris Roberts. Great game, but I despise the fact that people attribute the work of those programmers who worked to actually put the thing out (when he got his golden parachute and all they got was more crunch) to that huckster.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#62
post #52

Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be a curse. Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did things right in the sense that they released a complete game and added to it. I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I can think of is tha…

> I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping On its face, this seems like an obviously awful idea. Escaping from prison the first time sounds awesome. Escaping from prison the fifth time sounds super boring.

This is a question of gameplay. You could build entire games around escaping from prisons that people would totally enjoy playing. There have been far simpler ideas that people play even after a decade. Heck if you do it the right way I could see players want to go to prison just to play the escape thing.

So there is nothing inherent to the topic that makes or breaks this. On an very abstract level it is something that forces you into a different kind of gameplay as a punishment. Whether that different kind of gameplay is engaging or boring is a different can of beans.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#63
post #9

I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was stupid, lesson learned. Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those hug…

I still play Freelancer sometimes. It's a great game.

Outside the MMO, Earth & Beyond, cancelled way before its time, I have a hard time naming any space game that so effectively captures the wonder, mystery, and fear of space travel as Freelancer.

I remember cruising through a desolate system brimming with the broken hulks of battlecruisers to be ambushed by alien Nomads as I tried to beat a hasty retreat with my cargo bay full of high-grade weapons salvage.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#64
So the "Core Tech" for the year are:

- volumetric clouds

- interior/exterior culling

- "dynamic door alignment"

- ship engine swapping

So looks like they won't be completing their magic millions-of-players-on-a-single-instance tech any time soon. [0]

[0] https://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmissio...

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#65
post #52

Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be a curse. Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did things right in the sense that they released a complete game and added to it. I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I can think of is tha…

I thought so too in the past, I was ridiculing Star Citizen, I've called it a scam, now I'm happy that someone is not releasing another space game - Elite works - but tries to do something very very ambitious, something beyond everyone else. We'll see if they can generate money for the next 10 years, I hope they can. PS: I've bought Elite but not Star Citizen ;-) PPS: I've also bought Elite in 1984 and was blown away…

But that doesn't contradict what cletus said. Even if they wanted to be ambitious, with such a large scale there simply is no way there isn't some way to carve out a coherent core to deliver early and then iterate on.

I've done some ambitious things in my engineering career... nothing like Star Citizen in absolute scope but relative to the resources I had they were ambitious. But I always made sure there was some core I could show off before the project was complete.

If nothing else, Agile (by which I mean more the orginal manifesto rather than any specific thing like "scrum") recommends this sort of approach for a reason. The more parts you develop in isolation in your "ambitious" project, the higher the odds are that when it comes time to put them all together, they won't go together. Games have the extra problem that they can both technically fail to go together as expected, but they can also artistically fail to go together as well, making it even riskier to do this in gaming. Many is the game where the obvious fault lines between the various pieces are plainly visible in the final product. (Heck, The Ubisoft Game™ that they keep remaking and just slapping new skins on is all but a game structure designed to make this approach possible, which is basically why they keep remaking it over and over; it's not that they're artistically committed to it, it's that they've probably structured their entire game making organization around it and the rest is just Conway's Law.)

I still see little reason to expect Star Citizen to ever be anything like the hopes and dreams. I still expect that whatever finally comes out of this process will be profoundly disappointing. The process just can't work.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still play Freelancer sometimes. It's a great game.

Yes, and so easy to mod. The cancelation of the sequel broke my heart.

It's so good to see the Discovery servers still running after all these years.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#69
post #52

Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be a curse. Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous came around at roughly the same time but Elite has been a complete game for years. Elite did things right in the sense that they released a complete game and added to it. I've seen videos on Star Citizen talking about new systems they're adding like being put in prison and escaping and all I can think of is tha…

I am a huge E:D fan, but they really botched the last expansion, to the point I no longer play at all. I get the feeling they are starving for programmers and designers.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#70
post #9

I bought a ship relatively late, in 2013. I also built my gaming PC that I'm still using to this day around then hoping to have something beefy enough to play Star Citizen. Obviously that was stupid, lesson learned. Chris Roberts has made some phenomenal games that I absolutely love, but even Freelancer was in production hell for years before being reigned in by Microsoft. Star Citizen is pretty much all of those hug…

> If Star Citizen could actually deliver everything it promised, it'd be a damned near perfect game for [...]

The thing is that this can be said about many games, but something that will always hold true is that "potential", "vision" and "promises" are not worth much (basically nothing) when it comes to games. The loop of overambitious (or false) promises -> failed execution and delivery is as old as games themselves.

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