81–89 of 89 posts
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Yes, but a _significant_ portion of those are marketing. If you look only at development costs, nothing comes close to Star Citizen.
Wouldn't you argue that Star Citizen is mostly marketing?
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> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy. This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect. Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor. Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult…
> Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. This is emphatically not the case. In its time, Mass Effect was considered very innovative -- one of the first "cinematic" game experiences, if not the first. (e.g., https://www.wired.com/2007/07/preview-mass-ef/ ) They did a lot of stuff with in-…
Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what they’ve done is undeniably grand and impressive, no matter how buggy it still is.
Critics of this game have moved the goal posts so many times they are out of the stadium. Face it - Star Citizen exists. People play it, enjoy it, and pay for it. The devs are trying to make something crazy and huge. It is entirely on brand with Chris Roberts’s history. He made Wing Commander which only ran on computers that nobody could afford at the time. Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what…
It is grand and impressive, but very much not in a good way.
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That is a very pointless comparison. Mass Effect is a plot-driven theme-park, while Star Citizen is a World-Simulation. Not quite the same type of software. Minecraft or Microsoft Flight Simulator are probably the better comparison. > Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time? World of Warcraft and similar long-running service-games could be in the same range, but…
Nah, think about it. You're looking at about two years between games. Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy. And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous! And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms. Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers ha…
But,
> they [bioware] did all of that to AAA standards
What do you mean by 'AAA standards'? You seem to imply it as a good thing but I can only think of it as a bad thing. AAA originally defines a budget not a standard, but when I think of what AAA has become, to me it means microtransactions, incredibly bloated games (100gb?), exclusivity, always-online, DRM, unnecessary accounts, and pretty much missing the point on that games are supposed to be fun.
A positive for 'AAA standards' must be accessibility features & internationalization, but that's all that comes to mind.
I've realized with video games being creative efforts, turning it into office work sucks all the fun out and lets 1-person creations (such as minecraft) run circles around businesses.
Anyway, neither applies to star citizen, which seems to be selling a dream rather than a product, and if it ever got to product stage the reality that people blew their money would set in.
Anyway, that was 2 US presidents ago. Still waiting huh?
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That is a very pointless comparison. Mass Effect is a plot-driven theme-park, while Star Citizen is a World-Simulation. Not quite the same type of software. Minecraft or Microsoft Flight Simulator are probably the better comparison. > Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time? World of Warcraft and similar long-running service-games could be in the same range, but…
Nah, think about it. You're looking at about two years between games. Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy. And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous! And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms. Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers ha…
40 Hours is not much, especially for the complete run, which usually contains grind and secrets. Going by that logic, Stardew Valley would be a better game, with 200 hours of content. Star Citizen should be even massivly better game, with 300 to 1950 Hours of content. Playtime is a useless metric if you ignore quality, complexity and game-type.
> And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!
You say it, as if Star Citizen isn't doing the same, and more.
> And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Just as a reminder, Mass Effect is using a Unreal Engine, meaning the vast work is done from someone else. Assets are dead content and a solved problem, they run on whatever platform your engine is working on. But as another Metric, Mass Effect 1-3 had still 9-10 Years of development-time, not including remakes and ports. Because it seems you forgot that Mass Effect 1 had also some years of development before its release, which was 3-4 years. That the other games then could release so fast is no surprise, they build on each other and mostly add dead assets.
> Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging.
Nobody is saying that Bioware is a bad Company, or that Mass Effect wasn't a good and innovative game. But it's a different game and situation from Star Citizen, and it's company. Bioware did only a little bit of innovation, mostly transferring solved problems from movie-creators to gaming. The rest is just a regular story-game, using the regular old tools and experience they had. Star Citizen on the other side is a constant research, they build a high level simulation, went through several engines and fixed problems in areas which Mass Effect has not even touched upon. This is just not the same.
> As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011.
Minecraft wasn't done with 1.0. It's constantly being improved in the last 15 years. This is the point where Minecraft and Star Citizen are the same, the constant research for more and better mechanics. This is very different from adding just dead asset-content.
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I wrote it off when a bunch of Freelancer fans were like "hey, is this going to have third-person ship combat and manual flying through asteroids?" and Roberts said "Yeah!" and then after he got their money he was like "Never mind, that will cost me money from the sim addicts, so we're not doing that."
Yeah, I was basically hoping for Freelancer 2. Galaxy on Fire and then Everspace 2 mostly scratched that itch, but I still think Freelancer did some things better.
GTA6 is rumored to cost $2B. How can they possibly make a good game for $700M?