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Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

robertsspaceindustries.com

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Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#91

Post by branon »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #85
spywaregorilla wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Or go to jail, escape from jail, steal your equipment back, and assassinate a few guards on the way out.

Yeah, going to prison in video games can be quite fun and dynamic to the point where the scenario is replayable. Helps that there's a different jail in each major city in Skyrim as well.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#92

Post by jerf »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #83
jerf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-)

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 those games, because the developers are not struggling just to get the engine to do what it is they wanted or learn how to do the basics, and are now creating a game quickly and confidently based on experience.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#93

Post by bob1029 »

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…

In my opinion, constraints (especially money & time) are critical for sustaining the creative spirit. If you aren't at least a little bit hungry or challenged, your brain is going produce some lazy uninspired trash that only happens to look fun on a 3 minute youtube trailer.

If you are constantly trying to push some notion of a gigantic, ever-expanding open world, then someone is still going to have to paint within those confines in order to build a meaningful experience. The bigger you make it the harder it is to do this.

If you find yourself in this position (tons of money & time), maybe double down on the idea that you might suck at building engaging creative experiences, but do have the ability to produce profoundly capable tooling & engine code. License the tech out to someone who has a more reasonable creative vision.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#95

Post by Cthulhu_ »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #42

I would be pretty cool if there was a mass effect mmo imo. I prefer the lore of that game over whatever is in star citizen and bioware has actual experience developing AAA. If EA had half a brain they would beatup robert and take his development money.

Star Wars Online is the closest you'll probably get, also made by Bioware and probably what sucked the life out of the ME team at the time.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#96

Post by moritonal »

peanut_worm wrote: post #12

How do they have so little done after so long? And with so much money? I understand game development is very difficult but I don’t think games normally take over 10 years to make.

Maybe from the fact they have a bespoke custom progress tracker? Seems a lot of time's been spent on looking good on paper.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#97

Post by neversaydie »

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…

Yep. Never had much hope for Star Citizen and only moderate interest as a consequence, but my particular remembrance is some random line in one of the dev updates a while back. It mentioned how environment humidity would affect character endurance. Coming on top of many, many similar lines, that was pretty much the "yeah, this isn't going to work out" moment for me. It's stuck in my mind as a one-liner memento mori of sorts ever since.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#98

Post by anoraca »

Aeolun wrote: post #3

Is there an actual game to play now? When I backed this a decade ago I kind of expected to see this game before I turned 30.

Squadron 42 was supposed to be a stand alone game that was part of it, still not ready https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/28/22203055/star-citizen-squ...

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#99

Post by smudgy »

I'll admit I bought in to Star Citizen - I am/was in a good place financially and the money spent isn't something I fondly miss.

I remember the early days where Chris Roberts would say anything to folks asking for things like "can my guy be left handed to shoot but right handed to right?" or "can my character have a tattoo that isn't visible to anyone?" - these aren't really examples but they were the level of questions I remember folks asking. He'd answer "yes" to anything and everything.

I quickly realized that the game would become a chore when folks were euphoric that you'd have to manually load cargo on your ships. It felt like folks didn't want a space game but a second life and there was already a great space game that didn't waste my time doing stupid loops that I didn't want (Elite Dangerous, though they did add stupid loops with Engineering).

After that I kept following the project's development and having a giggle as the madness increased over time.

Re: Star Citizen Progress Tracker v1.0

#100

Post by leetcrew »

korse wrote: post #82
cletus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.
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