NasWulf wrote on Oct 18, 2016, 08:06:
Well, I never said the game was finished, closed to finished or currently has enough content to warrant a release. I just see their development model very close to the early access model.

Releasing builds as you're going along does not 'early access model' make. It makes me depressed to think that people are watching SC and thinking "This is so cool; I'm getting to see behind the scenes as a game is made!" without appending "really, really badly." This is NOT how games are made. CR would have been reined in or fired by now if he didn't own the thing.

Well, I never said the game was finished, closed to finished or currently has enough content to warrant a release. I just see their development model very close to the early access model. That very well might work for a lot of people and it might not work well for other people. That is the main reason I haven't purchased a package yet, it needs more for me to make the purchase.

But I can also see where they currently, like it or not, have just a endless pile of funds. That might be the best thing ever in game development as it allows them to just do whatever they want and not have to worry about time lines, redos, feature creep ... OR .. it might be the worst thing it terms that the game will never be finished because they will never have a cut off point. It seems a lot of that was determined by the backers and not by CIG (well mostly as CIG could have cut off funding at a point). The backers are the ones that keep giving the funds, but that is my only point with the funds, people keep saying "will they have enough funding?" well I believe they will based on the current amount of funding they just keep hauling in.

Again, if come November of 2018 and we are here still talking about how SC need to finish up their basic release components and not talking about SC / SQ42 expansion, then we can see the open ending money supply did nothing to help.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected: labels like 'early access' or 'released' do colour perception of the product in front of you.

To an extent that's fine. If a studio 'releases' something you see as broken and unfinished, you know their expectations and yours are out of whack. But 'early access' and 'beta' are not get out of jail free cards. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone on a forum write "Relax, it's just a beta, all this is going to change", I could probably fund a space MMO myself.

You look at SC and see 'early access', and because THEY also describe it in those terms you think everything's fine.

But when you look at what they've managed to put in front of people for the time and number of people involved, it's REALLY substandard. There's a popular misconception that in games you get nothing, nothing, nothing, BOOM it all comes together in a big rock-music montage at the end - a misconception that's fed by the way publishers keep projects dark until the latter stages.

That is pretty much the polar opposite of reality. In (well-planned, well-organised) game dev, progress (in terms of features) tends to be logarithmic. Everything flies together at first. Then, as systems evolve and mesh together, feature progress slows and content production ramps up.

CIG have tried to do everything backwards, and it shows. Will people cough up enough money for them to muddle through? Maybe. I'm kinda torn on what I want to happen. I don't want people to be disappointed and lose their money for nothing. I don't want crowdfunding as a whole to be blighted by a colossal failure. But at the same time, does this kind of arrogance and incompetence deserve to succeed? Not talking about individual programmers or artists here, just the top brass.

Frontier have done everything as right as can realistically be done. They focused and delivered a solid MVP, fulfilled their backer pledges, and have been building on it ever since. CIG basically tore up their promises to their backers as soon as they saw the $$$, made a procession of stupid, wasteful decisions that caused grief to the devs working on the game, and funded their excess by milking fans with glitzy, misleading high-content-bandwidth footage that can't POSSIBLY scale to the size of game they're attempting. If that shit works... it's kind of a kick in the teeth to studios who are trying to do the right thing. I don't know if I can stomach seeing Chris Roberts preening on YouTube atop a pile of burnt-out programmers and artists.

So, that's MY cards on the table Will they get enough funding? I think they'll get enough for SOMETHING. Maybe they'll get over this hump to a place where they can start charging a subscription and grow the game in a more sensible fashion. Or maybe they'll crash and burn. Which would be a shame because there was no need for that to happen.

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 13:13:
Quick question: if SC was suddenly flagged as 'released' tomorrow, with everything left to be done reclassified as 'live updates', would you feel differently about it?

if SC was released tomorrow as is, states they need more funds to finish so they have to go to a 'live update' format, then no .. I'd say fix your shit before you release and I wouldn't buy into it until they do.

if SC released tomorrow as 3.0 with the planet stuff, new systems, starmarine, and network fixes, I might, and I stress might buy in as the planet stuff (to me) looks very cool and I'd like to see PlanetSide style game play eventually. BUT not at 45bucks, more like 19 or 29$ with the knowledge that more updates might cost 10-15 dollars, and depending on the quality of those updates to put more funds into the game.

and then another release with SQ42 in 6 months ... with live updates from now until EoL of the game.

Edit 2 ... if they were to just change the alpha pre title from their releases to just a release scheme with live updates, but nothing else changed as far as their development cycle, then i would do what im currently doing, waiting for the right amount of content added to the game that i feel is good enough to be released before i buy into the game.

Edit ... let me add that i have not and do not buy into early access games as well. Ive only supported one KS project.

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 14:35.

Quick question: if SC was suddenly flagged as 'released' tomorrow, with everything left to be done reclassified as 'live updates', would you feel differently about it?

I guess I look at SC development much like Steams early access development model. I see a game that is for sale for $45 entry level content, where you can play in development parts but it's not yet ready for full release (E:D is fully released). In early access people are spending money to help finish the game, the more they spend the bigger and better the game is (supposedly). A good game example is ARK (which I understand will never come out of early access, but that's another conversation). ARK is always on Steams top 10 sales list, and still sells tons of copies, it is unfinished but yet there is still content to keep the players wanting more so they get their friends to buy it or they get the expansion pack, therefore more money goes into the development cycle.

That how I see SC at the moment, an endless pit of money getting dumped into their coffers (at the moment) from backers, new players and people buying more ships (DLC) to help finish the game. I see their budget always growing because the fans are always putting money into it. I don't see SC as a "set in stone" development budget like other games to where game A. has to be done by such in such date and cost under such and such amount of dollars.

If say they go 2, 3, 4 years more without delivering major content then people will get fed up and stop feeding the development engine, then you can say ... see ... it was too good to be true. But if say in 2 years time SC is at a state where they call it Release version 1.0 and not alpha, and they then say ya this took 250 million to make, I'm guessing by the amount of money they continue to pull in monthly from fans as well as the brand deals like the Intel, Saitek, AMD, private deals they will have that funding to get to that point. Not to mention the money injection they will receive from SQ42 sales when it's released in a few months with coverage on review sites, adding to the ever growing funds they already have.

Now how they get to that point and how they are doing it, well that's also up for debate, but from what I see and read, it looks like a typical AAA development cycle to me with setbacks, redos, and delays included ... and from what has been shown, it looks to me like they can deliver on most of their promises, but I'm said to be bias

hmmm double posts ...

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 12:22.

NasWulf wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:21:
but you're speculating as truth. Instead of saying something like, I don't know how they are going to do such in such with less funds then say Destiny .... but instead you say ... they absolutely will not finish because ...

it's an opinion not grounded with facts

Sure, it's an opinion - a judgement call, if you will. An extrapolation from known facts based on my knowledge and experience.

Fact: SC is much more ambitious than Destiny and they have a smaller budget. It's much more ambitious than KOTOR, and they have a smaller budget.

That in itself doesn't mean they couldn't pull off something amazing. But for that to happen, they would need to be absolutely NAILING their scheduling, development planning - making clever and efficient decisions to eke the most out of the funds they have.

Yet when we compare SC to E:D, we see that they are thrashing around on fire, as measured both by progress achieved per dollar and by their own documented wastefulness.

Or look at it this way: it is, to my mind, beyond doubt that if you took whatever money SC has left and gave it to E:D, right now, you would end up with a better, more fully-featured game in a shorter time-frame. And that's true whether they have $1m or $100m. Doesn't that ring true to you, too? What does SC actually have, right now, that couldn't be added to Elite much more easily and cheaply than bringing SC up to speed?

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 09:19.

nin wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:38:

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:08:
Show me again where I said they were running out of money? You seem to be confusing two different issues here.

Please don't feed the troll shill.

Oh there you go again with your stimulating one-liner conversations, you're so witty /blushing

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:08:
Show me again where I said they were running out of money? You seem to be confusing two different issues here.

Please don't feed the troll shill.

but you're speculating as truth. Instead of saying something like, I don't know how they are going to do such in such with less funds then say Destiny .... but instead you say ... they absolutely will not finish because ...

it's an opinion not grounded with facts

If you say someone's car doesn't have enough petrol to get to their destination, does their fuel light have to be on in order for you to be right?

Sheesh...

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:08:
Show me again where I said they were running out of money? You seem to be confusing two different issues here.

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 07:04:
Q. Have they raised enough money to build the game they promised?

A. Based on the dev cost of much less ambitious games grounded in established tech, no - UNLESS they somehow manage to schedule development and build and scale content much more efficiently than those games did.

Q. Ok, so ARE they scheduling their development and building and scaling content much more efficiently than these benchmark titles?

A. No. They're doing it much, much worse.

you have said on many threads you believe they don't/won't have the funds to finish based on other titles as well as these two post just as examples. You've also implied several times you think they will run out of funds long before shipping a finished title based on other development costs in the pasts (the destiny blurb). You can argue semantics about how you think they are doing it all wrong or how one game did it better, that's fine as everyone has their own opinion on how they think things are going, but until the shop folds with nothing to show, then the money argument is mute.

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 08:29.

NasWulf wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 08:04:
ok , so please .. prove it .. show us the email from CR that is that shows he's desperately looking for more funds. Show us the giant layoffs of employees, the studio shut downs, the consolidation of assets ... I'm mean , all I keeps seeing and reading about are expansions, Tech being finished, more hired people, and more money being raised ... and bungie is the last developer to be praised on money management ... lol

Show me again where I said they were running out of money? You seem to be confusing two different issues here.

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 07:57:

NasWulf wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 07:49:
pick your poison is SC a MMO, or is it a FPS .. even if you combine them and say $166 million,

Because when you try to realise two concepts in one package, you just add the two costs together. Right.

XD

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Destiny cost $500m...

ok , so please .. prove it .. show us the email from CR that is that shows he's desperately looking for more funds. Show us the giant layoffs of employees, the studio shut downs, the consolidation of assets ... I'm mean , all I keeps seeing and reading about are expansions, Tech being finished, more hired people, and more money being raised ... and bungie is the last developer to be praised on money management ... lol

NasWulf wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 07:49:
pick your poison is SC a MMO, or is it a FPS .. even if you combine them and say $166 million,

Because when you try to realise two concepts in one package, you just add the two costs together. Right.

XD

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Destiny cost $500m. Opinions vary as to the size, but 'smaller than Skyrim' seems a safe call.

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 08:04.

Peeeling wrote on Oct 17, 2016, 07:04:
And for bonus points:

Q. Ok, so can you back that up by naming a game in the same genre that's managed to do more with less?

Battlefield 4 cost $100 million to make.
WoW costs $66 million

pick your poison is SC a MMO, or is it a FPS .. even if you combine them and say $166 million, SC is well on the way to raise that in crowdfunding during its development ..... /sigh you will keep losing the money argument because you have to facts to prove it ...

jdreyer wrote on Oct 15, 2016, 16:57:
A year ago I would have agreed with you. There's an old adage in the charity industry, "You have to spend money to make money. " They have spent a couple mil on all of the vids, contests, website, Citcon, and all the other community outreach they've done. They've pulled in $30M. So you could say it was not inefficiently spent at all. Without that expenditure they don't bring in 10% of that.

I absolutely understand that principle. But it doesn't matter. It's about answering two very simple questions:

Q. Have they raised enough money to build the game they promised?

A. Based on the dev cost of much less ambitious games grounded in established tech, no - UNLESS they somehow manage to schedule development and build and scale content much more efficiently than those games did.

Q. Ok, so ARE they scheduling their development and building and scaling content much more efficiently than these benchmark titles?

A. No. They're doing it much, much worse.

And for bonus points:

Q. Ok, so can you back that up by naming a game in the same genre that's managed to do more with less?

This comment was edited on Oct 17, 2016, 07:37.

Peeeling is 100% correct. Star Citizen development has been managed very poorly. What we are seeing now with the development of the cloud-based infracstructure, for example, should have been the first priority since it is the foundation for everything else. This "boring" foundation development should have been 2012/2013 priority material, not 2016.

Instead, CIG focused their development on fast results and around a ship pipeline beginning with the fancy JPEG concepts.
In short, they followed a purely revenue orientated project plan and not a long term project plan driven by the ultimate goal to deliver the full scope PU.

One could write novels about this but quick examples would be the many ship iterations and reworks. All of that is usually stuff that would be done post-release when the devs are fine-tuning, iterating, rebalancing and so on.
Or a game mode like racing. CIG did this because it was relatively quick to implement along with Arena Commander but in any normal game development, racing would have had very low priority.
Do the vast majority of the people want to race or do they rather want to trade, smuggle, bounty-hunt, mine, play a pirate etc. etc. etc.? Right.

It is because of this short term goal revenue driven development process that Star Citizen is now a clusterfuck of a project. CIG now somehow needs to turn the ocean liner around and attempt to optimize their processes for a longer term full scope content delivery plan but -no surprise- they are struggling hard against their chairman's piss-poor decisions of the past.

Frontier naturally did a much better job in that regard. They always had a long term vision for Elite Dangerous, released a basic version and are now delivering the full vision update by update for as long as people keep buying the expansions.

This is another advantage compared to SC. If E:D goes tits up, people will still have a fairly solid game to play (e.g. the 400bn star systems will not be fully explored during our lifetime or that of our children and grandchildren either ... it will take roughly 20,000 years!).
If SC runs out of funding or it suddenly dries up, well, I know CR claims that they could still "finish" the game but that is definitely 100% bullshit with 300 employees on the payroll and you can not downscale so easily after you have upscaled so massively. Not possible. Changing the workflows and majorly reversing the project schedule would take a tremendous effort that would not magically lead to faster content delivery. Quite the opposite. Things would get even more chaotic and collapse faster.
Anyway, if SC goes tits up, then you don't even really have a basic version of what was promised for the foreseeable future (remember... we will still be at only 1 single star system until about early or mid 2018).

So, you can say about Frontier or E:D what you want, like how the cockpits are ugly with the pee-yellow colors or how you hate David Braben's fancy glasses and that 400bn star systems sucks because YOU can not explore them all even if you played 24/7 for the rest of your life, BUT in terms of project planning E:D is objectively the vastly better managed project.

On a high level (long term project plan), Frontier are doing it exactly right and contrary to CR's usual inane random babbling when he loses himself in his pipedream fantasies like how you will hide in a cargo container and sneak on board a ship to shoot the pilot and hijack/steal the ship, it is a joy to listen to David Braben's very intelligent, very realistic (or often times British understatement even), factual statements when he talks about E:D.

Braben knows exactly what he wants and whether it can or will be done and he doesn't shy away from simply saying 'nope' to the gamers while Roberts 99% of the time says "oh that is something we definitely want to, sort of, look into in the future", no matter how crazy the idea might be.

If SC would have been driven by a project plan focused on content delivery, we'd be much further along today. We might not be at $120+ million and maybe we would have a little less FIDELITEH and no other Hollywood actors in S42 except Hamill but all of that would be fixable by the success of the game. CIG could have always prettified and polished things post-release like any sane developer would have done.
But it is what it is... we must live with this clusterfuck caused by revenue-driven development where fast results, ship JPEGS and "OMG-so-exciting-reveals" for game/community shows have always taken precedence over everything else which is now biting CIG in the ass massively.

theyarecomingforyou wrote on Oct 15, 2016, 17:54:

Peeeling wrote on Oct 15, 2016, 09:22:
Elite is not a finished game. It's every bit as much a work in progress as SC. The difference is that it's been developed in a sensible manner, so what you get right now is a solid, joined-up experience that could pass for a complete, albeit rather insubstantial game. To say that SC is being developed in a better way because you prefer their specific flight/combat system is silly. I'm not claiming the Elite devs are making better design decisions. I'm saying they're making infinitely better development and scheduling decisions.

That's your opinion. I disagree.

Well, given that only one of us has been developing games for a living for the last 22 years, I know which opinion I'M going to be listening to.

Elite: Dangerous has been released. Star Citizen is in alpha. Elite is being expanded upon but you can't pretend it hasn't been released - it was released two years ago. I own both games, so don't pretend I'm not familiar with them.

Juggling semantics is the white flag of internet surrender. Both Elite and Star Citizen are, as of now, available to the public to play for a roughly similar price and after a roughly equivalent dev time. Yes, absolutely, Elite deserves to be called 'released', since it is a playable product in its current form, while Star Citizen is not. But it's deliberately disingenuous of you to describe it as 'complete' when so many features are still in the pipeline. When Elite was first 'released' there was no planetside gameplay - now there is. There's no multi-crew - soon there will be. It's every much as bit a work in progress as SC - it's just hugely further along on a fraction of the budget. I mean, seriously: is that what counts as a victory in your mind? That SC has managed to spend ten times the money making something that can't even be called 'released'?