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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

robertsspaceindustries.com

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Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#81

Post by Jedd »

Is Starfield (only recently saw an announcement from Bethesda about this) going to bite into the massive-universe and do-all-the-things market?

I played Elite (the original) on the C64, and loved it. I've been 'meaning to play ED for years' - but still haven't. I bought No Man's Sky, was disappointed, as were many, at the time, but about a year ago started playing again - got excited (again) and then lost interest due to the heavy time commitment required to do anything useful.

I suspect games like Red Dead Redemption II would be a similar time-sink without an awful lot of ersatz (in-game) accomplishments. I'm tempted, but wary.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#82

Post by korse »

cletus wrote: post #76
zionic wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

What about Eve online?

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#83

Post by KingOfCoders »

jerf wrote: post #65
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…

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 cor…

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 ;-)

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#84

Post by sumtechguy »

twic wrote: post #51
least wrote: 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…

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.

Not a bad thought. But this looks more like a project that has been mismanaged like DN4. They have raised well past 370 million at this point.

They are basically making Wing Commander Privateer 4 at this point. Game wise they would have been better off shipping something years ago that worked and then iterating on it. However, it seems money wise the route they are going is their business decision and that is doing very well. There are a lot of tall 'promises' made that are not going to live up to the hype.

I personally gave up pre-buying any games ages ago. I have plenty of existing games that work. In some cases I have not played some for 20+ years and I am going back and playing them again and it is a blast as I do not remember much of it other than a vague 'I think I liked this one'.

What game I do see looks very nice. But there is not a lot of meat on those bones. In its current state looks like a very solid tech demo. When they finally ship I look forward to seeing what they got. But at this point I do not expect much.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#85

Post by Cthulhu_ »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #59
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 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.

Why? It's a mechanic in TES games like Skyrim; commit a crime, you get the option to either pay it off, go to jail (and lose some stats), or try and fight a whole town worth of guards.

I mean you start most TES games in prison.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#86

Post by Cthulhu_ »

karmicthreat wrote: post #49
least wrote: 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…

Jumpgate scratched the itch years ago and I was hoping this game would too. But its just not really a game yet. Star Citizen is pretty much the proof that unlimited resources is not necessarily a good thing for a project. Constraints can help keep things focused.

It's probably the worst and most notable example of scope creep I've ever seen. They could have released a game years ago, but instead they chose to keep piling things on, then realizing their game is already outdated before release so back to the drawing board.

Massively mismanaged project, and not just because it was overfunded.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#87

Post by Cthulhu_ »

vsareto wrote: post #34
rozab wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do love Elite Dangerous, but its a great example of how difficult it is to make tradeoffs between realism and fun. It can take months to physically travel to another player (it's not so bad in the bubble, but still), which makes multiplayer difficult. There were always going to be difficulties in implementing atmospheric landings and space legs with the way the game world is, but I think the way they've done it is…

EVE, Elite, and Star Citizen have all done the walking around + ships and it's all been pretty meh (with the first never really going live except for an apartment). It's a cursed feature apparently.

It can work, but not in a procedurally generated / sandbox game; you need to add a campaign, a story, custom designed environments, etc.

One example where things do / can work is Space Engineers, where players can build and program maps in the sandbox for others to play.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#88

Post by Cthulhu_ »

falcolas wrote: post #46
bovermyer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elite: Dangerous comes pretty close to your specified dream, what with the new expansion.

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.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#89

Post by AlexandrB »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #54
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 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.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#90

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Jedd wrote: post #81

Is Starfield (only recently saw an announcement from Bethesda about this) going to bite into the massive-universe and do-all-the-things market? I played Elite (the original) on the C64, and loved it. I've been 'meaning to play ED for years' - but still haven't. I bought No Man's Sky, was disappointed, as were many, at the time, but about a year ago started playing again - got excited (again) and then lost interest du…

RDR2 is, overall, a more enjoyable game because you can dip in and out of it; with Elite, No Man's Sky, etc you're pretty much expected to play it for a lot of time with little happening in the meanwhile (with more stuff happening in NMS in the same amount of time).
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