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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

robertsspaceindustries.com

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Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#111

Post by georgeecollins »

jerf wrote: post #92
KingOfCoders wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think if they "deliver early and then iterate on." people would lose interest and it would be much more difficult to raise money. PS: I've introduced Agile in several companies as CTO, no need to convince me ;-)

In this situation, I'd fully expect them to deliver something early, and then sell another game in the next generation, or sell DLC, or something like that. It's more-or-less a proved revenue model; nobody's quite doing something exactly like Star Citizen, but there's plenty of games that are "the previous game's engine and possibly content, but more". It's popular to hate on sequelitis, but I actually often enjoy th…

That just invites the disappointment of Star Citizen being like other games. As long as it is never finished it can potentially be completely revolutionary.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#112

Post by georgeecollins »

AlexandrB wrote: post #89
KingOfCoders wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We'll see if they can generate money for the next 10 years, I hope they can. Even if they keep going to 10 years, they're doomed. To be relevant 10 years from now, SC is probably going to have to switch engines. That will probably mean starting from scratch on many game systems and assets. There's a reason you don't see many (or any?) successful games that have a 10+ year development time.

I don't know if they have to switch engines in ten years. You could have made a game in 1997 with Unreal-- I can verify this because I was in a meeting with a demo at Activision where we considered this-- and Unreal is still a viable engine in 2021.

Game engines went through a period where they evolved very quickly, and they are still evolving. But the rate of change is slower, like word processors. It starts to make more sense to evolve them rather than replace them.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#113

Post by spjwebster »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #88
falcolas wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re dropping VR support in the new expansion. That sucks. If there’s any game perfect for VR, it’s space sims - as the prior release of E:D showed.

What, Elite: Dangerous? VR would be the only reason for me to go back to it, and me playing it in VR at the time was one of the best VR experienced I've had. Is that all because they can't make walking in space work in VR? I mean they could say "you need to play normally" when switching to space legs.

I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in the ship and in the SRV) remains and is currently one of the focus areas for fixes, but when you disembark your ship or SRV you're presented with a floating virtual screen.

There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#114

Post by have_faith »

cletus wrote: 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…

No Man's Sky has come a long way and you can call it a complete game now but they seem to have pivoted somewhere along the way into focusing on base building, multi player aspects, etc (going after the younger minecraft crowd?). It's still fun but the planet variation, story and minute to minute gameplay is very shallow even after all this time. I find it hard to feel motivated by anything in the game. It is a great looking game though and exploring can be fun until the repetition sets in.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#115

Post by m0llusk »

AlexandrB wrote: post #89
KingOfCoders wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We'll see if they can generate money for the next 10 years, I hope they can. Even if they keep going to 10 years, they're doomed. To be relevant 10 years from now, SC is probably going to have to switch engines. That will probably mean starting from scratch on many game systems and assets. There's a reason you don't see many (or any?) successful games that have a 10+ year development time.

They already have plans to switch engines in the near future. That is in the progress tracker mostly as "renderer".

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#116

Post by waynesonfire »

cletus wrote: 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 come to accept that this IS the game--an idea that backers get to observe, are included in the development, and play the game in their imagination. You're paying for the buy-in to be part of a development process and feel like you're making a contribution via feedback and alpha gameplay.

the company has made massive investments tech just around this feedback loop and to entertain these backers. it's a core to what they're doing.

unfortunately, this is not how it was sold when they first launched but that ship has sailed.

this is like WWF of game development. it's fake.

now you get a progress tracker that's fukin versioned to further feed you packets of endorphins to build up this imaginary world that doesn't exist.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#117

Post by platz »

georgeecollins wrote: post #110
MR4D wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Star Citizen is a cautionary tale about how too much money can be a curse. Star Citizen should be a B-school case study about how to raise money and make a good living doing what you enjoy. The fact that they continually raise money over years is telling that RSI is a huge success. [0] [0] - https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-03-15-star-citiz...

I think it is interesting to see how much people want the dream of a game, the evolving story, and the community. It is a great example of the things people want from gaming-- and life I guess. The closest thing I can think of is Minecraft, which IMO is a 100x better game but still you can't play it forever. People loved the creativity of it, but even more they liked the idea and the story of the creativity. How many…

Making a computer or a display or many of the huge replicas in minecraft isn't creative. They are just technical achievements.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#118

Post by spjwebster »

sbarre wrote: post #106
wayoutthere wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than being buggy, the expansion is bleeding players because the on-foot gameplay loops are super grindy (even for Elite) and not very fun in the first place. The xpac has absolutely zero new ship-based content, so people are just going off to play other FPS games that don’t suck. The PC community is already more or less dead just a month after it’s release; Steam player counts are lower than they’ve been in year…

Yeah given what the core player base seemed to be enjoying about this game (space exploration) I always kind of wondered "who is asking for this?" when they announced they were basically adding a B-tier FPS to Elite.. I suspect internally someone pitched the "FPS is more mass appeal and will draw in new players!" idea and it just went ahead uncontested? I've also read rumours (but enough from different places that th…

To be fair, on-foot gameplay (née "space legs") has been on the promised roadmap since the original kickstarter campaign, and it's a natural extension of the landable planets and SRV gameplay added in Horizons.

Frontier definitely tried to appeal to the typical FPS crowd with the on-foot conflict zones, which was a huge misstep: it was never going to be good enough as just a small part of a much larger game, and a lot of the existing players are much more interested in the space stuff.

If you ignore the shooty bit of the on-foot gameplay, though, it really does (or at least has the potential to) add to the core gameplay. Being able to walk around station hangers and concourses, prison ships, planetary installations and the planet surface itself is definitely increasing my enjoyment of the game.

The general hope is that they're leaving a bunch of the content releases - hints of new ships, SRVs and new thargoid-related gameplay - until the console releases for Odyssey in the autumn so that a large chunk of the playerbase isn't left behind. Sadly that means that us PC players are currently beta testing Odyssey, but after the recent patches it's just about performant and stable enough to enjoy.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#119

Post by platz »

The plot of any game like this is going to be the most bland, insipid storyline ever imagined. It will speak to absolutely no-one, but it will have some filler cinematics that have nice graphics.

In general, this is the case the higher profile and more money is poured into it.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#120

Post by kiksy »

leetcrew wrote: post #100
korse wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Eve online?

yes, eve online solved "griefing" by redefining it as "pvp". in all seriousness, I think their solution is pretty good. it's never 100% safe to undock, but it's prohibitively expensive to repeatedly kill a specific pve player in high-sec.

Eve solved it perfectly. The Eve universe is dangerous. By undocking you consent to PvP, don't fly what you can't afford to lose.

The game treats you like an adult that can accept risk and thus the rewards from playing the game are higher for me.

I wish more games took a similar mature approach.

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