How many years has it been?
About ten years now. It's not quite up to Duke Nukem Forever levels yet (15 years), but it's already one of the longest development cycles for a commercial game.
Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
171–180 of 241 posts
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#172This makes me think of the unofficial promise tracker which has been going for years: https://starcitizentracker.github.io/
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> but still you can't play it forever Says you.
Yea, Minecraft is a huge sandbox with lots of features. Players often come back to it over and over again years later.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#174Star 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…
I also found the game to be extremely underwhelming. It seems like they have added a lot of features, but there's still no core compelling gameplay loop. Also it's the worst type of procedural generation, where after a while you can practically see the perlin noise everywhere.
IMO the most interesting thing about NMS is their marketing story. They were able to achieve enormous hype before launch, and since then they've been able to continuously grab headlines with the redemption narrative. I would love to know who's doing their marketing/PR because I believe they are very talented.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#175I 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…
It's funny to think the development of Star Citizen started in the same year that Falcon 9 first launched. I like Star Citizen for being the one constant thing in life. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I know there will always be a Star Citizen roadmap to look up.
Falcon 9 1.0 was announced in 2005, launched in 2010 and cost about US$300 million [0].
Star Citizen was announced in 2010 and has raised over US$300 million [1].
It's wild to me that it takes twice as long and similar amount of money to make a game launch than a rocket launch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_v1.0 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#176I 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…
The cathedrals that are the most visible surviving monument to the culture of the middle ages took a century each to build. Perhaps the truly great video games of our era will take just as long.
I think Duke Nukem Forever and Daikatana showed us that longer dev times don't necessarily produce better games.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making a computer or a display or many of the huge replicas in minecraft isn't creative. They are just technical achievements.
I agreed completely until I started playing Minecraft with kids. Once they taught me how to play, I got to see the amount of creativity within the game. From my perspective, it's a really amazing way to start instilling mathematical literacy in kids and the best part is that they have so much fun they don't even realize it. As an example, thanks to Minecraft, my five year old already has an understanding of exponents…
understanding of exponents and mathematical literacy is great but it's not the same thing as creativity.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#178Star 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 and all I can think of is that this sounds cool but why are you spending any effort on this before you have a core game?
This has been my impression too of Star Citizen for years now.
I won't be surprised if they soon jump on the crypto bandwagon and start auctioning off ships as blockchain NFTs. Still can't use them in a working game, but you can trade them on crypto markets.
It could be interesting to see markets apply sophisticated valuation tools to the net present value of future Star Citizen cash flows. I bet clever financial engineers could figure out ways continuing the funding and delaying Star Citizen's launch indefinitely.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
It adds a consequence to griefing/PVP. If you’re a pirate who has been to prison multiple times you really don’t want to go back… so your behavior is different.
Hot take: trying to appeal to both PvP and PvE players is the biggest mistake game designers make. History is littered with the corpses of "WoW killers" in the MMORPG genre and nearly all of them touted PvP as their killer feature, usually some form of world PvP. And it never works. Even WoW largely moved away from world PvP in favour of sandboxed PvP (ie arena, battlegrounds). This focus on PvP is my biggest concern…
I would counter this and say that my greatest time playing MMOs in my youth was the UO days where outside of cities, everything was pretty lawless. In the early stages you might run into a player killer intermittently while out mining or harvesting whatever other material or in a dungeon but the community formed around that aspect was really cool.
There was a bounty hunting system where killed players could put cash on the head of the killer. Groups of do-rights forming into guilds that would actively seek out people pking and griefing just for fun. Killers would also be permanently marked red in their name and banned from cities via the guard system. I think that whole aspect was more fun than the core dungeon component of the game and felt so organic.
Just my 2 cents. I miss when everything was explicitly designed from head to toe in a game design doc.
Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0
#180This game is the ultimate example of the danger inherent in feature creep. The original goals of an expansive FPS/Space Sim MMO with unprecedented player count and the largest crafted non procedural game world seems lost.
Which is a shame because that's what I was buying in to. I wanted massive player counts in a persistent and evolving universe. I didn't want "dynamic door alignment" and "Face over IP". My hope was Star Citizen would be the game to break the mold that WOW created 20 years ago and gave us the next generation of MMO.
They cant even finish the single player campaign which they did all the mocap and VA work for years ago. Is Mark Hamill going to still be alive when Squadron 42 is released?