76 replies to this topic

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

I've never heard of Derek Smart before today.

Apparently, he's been trying to make a game like Star Citizen since 1995 and wrote a long article on why failure is a more likely prospect than success.

http://www.reaxxion....mplete-disaster

[Heffay]

Well, he could be wrong, but unless they dial the scope back a whole bunch, this is going to be a huge challenge to implement.

I think they are focusing on SQ42 right now; if they get a great story and implement it as well as games like Witcher 3 did, that will go a long way to making the PU possible. But it seems to me like they are focusing on SQ42. Which is probably the right idea.

[Anjian]

I am not happy with the way this project is going. Its too ambitious, trying to do everything, and giving such expectations to the world.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

You know... such a project would take about 10 years of production time for a "normal" publisher like EA or Ubisoft. People start to worry about progress after a mere 2 years of production time where CIG already produced more stuff than other studios would have in 5 years (with the same amount of developers)

If you forget the scale of the project and disregard any kind of knowledge about the process of game development, yeah - you could throw such stuff out into the public and lose your face and your entire creditibility when SC hits release. Or you stay calm, reasonable and don't behave like a spoiled child and just wait until the project is released.

Even if SC would take another 3 years before release, I would call that "okay" - but as it stand they will be even faster than that. So chill out, take a cup of tea and enjoy the show.

[Inveramsay]

As someone who has actually shipped a full conversion source engine mod I can only agree. Obviously I haven't worked on anything of nearly the scope SC tries to achieve but what I can say for certain is going to kill it is the feature creep. If you can't reign it in, delays pile up and multiply until you get to a point where you simply can't make head way. With the feature creep you also get worse and worse complexity and problems you never anticipated start cropping up. I think they've put themselves into a completely unmanageable situation with regards to providing a product for people who have paid a lot of money for it.

While MWO isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination they have done the sensible thing. They launched closed beta with four mechs only and a couple of maps. By the time the beta opened up a bit more they had the basics of a game down. Since then they have been adding more maps, game modes etc in an incremental fashion which stops the feature creep from getting out of hand. What they could have done was to implement things faster than they have. There may be feature creep but it isn't as apparent as over at SC.

[Thorqemada]

Smart is often percived as arrogant ******* but he has a point nevertheless.
Roberts more often than not failed to deliver in time...and the project is going to bomb for its scope.
Maybe Elite will profit...

I have a litte money in both of them.

PS: Smart is involved in Alganon also since David Allen had to jump off for failing the development goals.
http://www.engadget....leaves-alganon/

Edited by Thorqemada, 07 July 2015 - 07:38 AM.

[Rebas Kradd]

Túatha Dé Danann, on 07 July 2015 - 02:29 AM, said:

You know... such a project would take about 10 years of production time for a "normal" publisher like EA or Ubisoft. People start to worry about progress after a mere 2 years of production time where CIG already produced more stuff than other studios would have in 5 years (with the same amount of developers)

So, five more years? I might be married with children by then. My life might look completely different by the time I'm able to enjoy the vision.

I don't begrudge game studios their setbacks (unlike some goons I know), but Chris Roberts allowed MASSIVE feature creep to sneak into the game. You have to have restraint. Now it's probably going to bite them in the butt in some fashion.

[Heffay]

Rebas Kradd, on 07 July 2015 - 11:12 AM, said:

So, five more years? I might be married with children by then. My life might look completely different by the time I'm able to enjoy the vision.

I don't begrudge game studios their setbacks (unlike some goons I know), but Chris Roberts allowed MASSIVE feature creep to sneak into the game. You have to have restraint. Now it's probably going to bite them in the butt in some fashion.

I remember all the jokes some people used to make when PGI talked about "deep seated Cryengine issues", saying that the problem was lack of talent, not a problem with the engine themselves. Then in the next breath talk about how CIG won't have the same issues since they hired the best talent out there, straight from Crytek.

Oh man, the memory of those threads warm my cockles so much right now.

[LennStar]

I also think Star Citizen is in big troubles. Its not the first time Chris Roberts has crashed into a feature creep wall here. Back at Wing Commander I he had to be "forcefully" prevented from making it even more demanding on hardware (for those who dont know it, WC I (and follwoing) was what we would call a "killer app" today, lots of people bought new hardware for WC games).
And while he "promised" that for SC too, I dont know why they didnt try to finish the first vision with the POSSIBILITY to more modules. Even without the additional stuff it was ambitious.
Which was one of 2 reasons why I didnt "invest". It looked already risky to me.

[Túatha Dé Danann]

Rebas Kradd, on 07 July 2015 - 11:12 AM, said:

So, five more years? I might be married with children by then. My life might look completely different by the time I'm able to enjoy the vision.

I don't begrudge game studios their setbacks (unlike some goons I know), but Chris Roberts allowed MASSIVE feature creep to sneak into the game. You have to have restraint. Now it's probably going to bite them in the butt in some fashion.

And? Games take years to develop. There are games out there taking 5-7 years to be produced, but they are announced half a year before release. Imagine what happens if you start such a project and tell your fans "See you in 7 years". Right: They would rage a little. Now, if you don't say a word, work silently for 6 years and then announce it, everything seems to be fine, right? Thing is: In both cases, it took 7 years, but in the second case, it only seems to have taken half a year.

And thats the problem here: The subjective short-term impression. Star Citizen is perfectly fine with its progress.

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

I thought this was interesting.

Quote

Chris Roberts "a bit too ambitious"

Wing Commander designer talks about his departure from Digital Anvil as the company is bought out by Microsoft

Published 06/12/2000

In the wake of the collapse of Digital Anvil, co-founder and soon-to-be-former CEO Chris Roberts has spoken about his decision to leave the company he founded just four years ago. As we suspected, the company's troubles were down to "wanting to develop not only hugely ambitious games, but too many hugely ambitious games", leaving the company's finances stretched after four years without a single game being released - the sole title to emerge with the Digital Anvil name on it was actually mostly developed by a small British company.

Having left the monolithic corporate world that is Electronic Arts almost five years ago to found Digital Anvil in the first place, it is somewhat ironic that his dream development studio is now being taken over by the monolithic corporate world that is Microsoft, and Roberts has confirmed that his decision to leave the company is simply because he has no desire to find himself in the same situation again.

We also have confirmation on the status of Digital Anvil's various games, with Chris Roberts apparently "spending a fair amount of time talking to other publishers" at the moment, trying to find a home for real-time strategy game "Conquest", which was dropped by Microsoft a few weeks ago, triggering the crisis that has lead to the company's demise. "Loose Cannon" will also be looking for a new publisher, with project lead Tony Zurovec leaving the company to complete the game elsewhere. Erin Roberts will be staying on at Digital Anvil though, continuing his work on an as-yet unannounced Xbox title.

But what next for Chris Roberts, the man who brought us the groundbreaking Wing Commander series? "I just want to see Freelancer out the door, and then I want to take some time to reassess everything. Taking three and a half to four years to build a massive title just seems like a huge amount of effort. There needs to be a better way to do it."

Rather worryingly though, according to GameSpot "he has expressed his interest to work in film and exploit broadband technology to us recently". Oh please god, no! Anybody who has had the misfortune to see the truly appalling Wing Commander movie will be praying that Chris has a sudden change of heart. Although he has produced some impressive games in his time, his debut movie was something of an unmitigated disaster, flopping at the box office and featuring some hilariously bad acting and dialogue which would be perfectly at home in a computer game cutscene, but just looks plain ridiculous on the big screen. We can but hope...

http://www.eurogamer...s/article_29857

Hopefully history won't repeat itself.

[Darth Futuza]

Inveramsay, on 07 July 2015 - 05:08 AM, said:

As someone who has actually shipped a full conversion source engine mod I can only agree. Obviously I haven't worked on anything of nearly the scope SC tries to achieve but what I can say for certain is going to kill it is the feature creep. If you can't reign it in, delays pile up and multiply until you get to a point where you simply can't make head way. With the feature creep you also get worse and worse complexity and problems you never anticipated start cropping up. I think they've put themselves into a completely unmanageable situation with regards to providing a product for people who have paid a lot of money for it.

While MWO isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination they have done the sensible thing. They launched closed beta with four mechs only and a couple of maps. By the time the beta opened up a bit more they had the basics of a game down. Since then they have been adding more maps, game modes etc in an incremental fashion which stops the feature creep from getting out of hand. What they could have done was to implement things faster than they have. There may be feature creep but it isn't as apparent as over at SC.

People like to say that PGI is terribad developer, but they have one of the most sensible development schedules I've seen when it comes to video game developers and they actually educate it, their patches are rarely ever late. Initially they weren't as good (lot of early promises about some features that didn't happen for a while), but right now they have what appears to me a very streamlined development process (but who can really say, maybe it's actually hell and all the developer's want to kill Russ). I think a lot could be learned from them by other developers.

[Elizander]

I only invest and pre-order robots. I do not do the same for spaceships.

That aside though, the article is good and very true. Unless you have a team dedicated to sorting out the code and algorithms to keep everything from crashing and a ridiculously sick random world generator that can make planets that you can just QA instead of building everything from scratch, not happening.

It's true, the tools do not exist, but they can someday. Of course, it will require dedication to create those tools and only then will bigger things be possible. Throwing money and manpower brute force at this will probably result in a lot of tears.

The latest Dev Vlog at PGI shows that they are (on a smaller scale) adding more tools to streamline their work which is good in the longrun.

Now SC just has to find that guy who can code them a universe-making tool and they're set.

[Tank]

I already spoken same things before, but now we have Derek Smart witch is an actual veteran of things to be creditable spoken this.

In now way I wish to bash Star Citizen or wish to see it fail - no, please no! I love to see testament projects that make me ave and wonder in amazement to be completed, even if they will not be profitable in any way - that's how real art should be created.

But I think Chris Roberts should be a head of DARPA - the only organization that can suffice his visions and would not mind failures if they given positive insights for future.

[Mister Blastman]

Star Citizen is already a disaster. The controller imbalance is beyond ridiculous. Right now it is no more than a simple tablet flash game where you tap the screen with one finger to win!

Use mouse = dominate the game with one hand.

It's pretty sad. And they are doing little about it. Well, other than cover up all the lies they told to get people to pay them money.

See this thread? It is over 1000 pages...

https://forums.rober...ontroller/p1006

Over 65% of the community would rather play with a joystick, but they can't! Well, they can, but they will fail miserably if they do versus mouse users. This is a space sim, one that Chris Roberts wouldn't be like Freelancer as far as control is concerned... yet... it is identical!

So many lies. There's a reason why less than a hundred people play Arena Commander a day.

At least Elite Dangerous got the control scheme right. I love Elite.

Elizander, on 08 July 2015 - 12:31 AM, said:

That aside though, the article is good and very true. Unless you have a team dedicated to sorting out the code and algorithms to keep everything from crashing and a ridiculously sick random world generator that can make planets that you can just QA instead of building everything from scratch, not happening.

Random planet generators already exist. See Space Engine. It is beautiful.

Edited by Mister Blastman, 08 July 2015 - 09:10 AM.

[Tank]

Tell me again how they making a simulator, yet have sounds in space... Even MWO don't do that on HPG Manifold. This alone answers why mouse are predominant - it's an arcade-sim.

If you want the real space simulator, head for Rouge System - it is developed by 1 guy and is a work of love more then anything, he already done more then SC have.

Edited by Tank, 08 July 2015 - 09:24 AM.

[White Panther]

Very ambitious project for sure. I bought one of the hornets and tried Arena commander, played it for a bit then stopped. No sense in getting bored out of my mind, i'll just sit on it and wait until its a full game. As it stands, because of my awful experience with MWO, SC and MWO are my first games I have ever funded pre-launch, and will also be my last.

I'm not going to be a hyprocite if SC sucks and didn't deliver on their promises. I'll be just as critical and negative as i've been with PGI, and I'll be sure to voice my concerns just the same. However, the time for that isn't now. Like I said I'll be holding back until I get a good look at a complete game first. I'm not going to compare SC with games that are "launched" at this point in time, that would be idiotic.

[Heffay]

Mister Blastman, on 08 July 2015 - 09:12 AM, said:

Over 65% of the community would rather play with a joystick, but they can't!

That thread is pretty meaningless, and that 65% number is way off base. It's about the same level of usefulness as the 3PV threads for MWO. Meaningless statistics, small vocal minority, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Star Citizen may have problems right now, but controller imbalance is so far down the list it's not even funny. And it's not even really an issue. Especially considering that the only way people are talking about it is to nerf mouse input. Which is ridiculous; you don't make the primary input method that will be used by 99%+ of the player base difficult and frustrating to use, just so a small subset of people feel they can be competitive.

Making the main controls of the game not fun and frustrating to use is a horrible idea, and hopefully CIG will correctly ignore it for a good long time.

[Mister Blastman]

Heffay, on 08 July 2015 - 09:43 AM, said:

That thread is pretty meaningless, and that 65% number is way off base. It's about the same level of usefulness as the 3PV threads for MWO. Meaningless statistics, small vocal minority, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Star Citizen may have problems right now, but controller imbalance is so far down the list it's not even funny. And it's not even really an issue. Especially considering that the only way people are talking about it is to nerf mouse input. Which is ridiculous; you don't make the primary input method that will be used by 99%+ of the player base difficult and frustrating to use, just so a small subset of people feel they can be competitive.

Making the main controls of the game not fun and frustrating to use is a horrible idea, and hopefully CIG will correctly ignore it for a good long time.

Dude. No. Just no. The controllers aren't imbalanced, they are broken. I am a hardcore flight sim/space sim pilot. I fly with stick/rudder/pedals all the time. But I can't compete with mouse users in Star Citizen. So for craps and giggles, I took a hornet for a spin in Vanduul Swarm with nothing more than a mouse. Guess what? I was killing vanduul in record time. It was stupid easy. I put in 1/10th the effort and was doing exponentially better!

The control issue is BIG. It is a BIG reason why people don't play Star Citizen. It is a boring pile of sludge at the moment. You want a good space combat experience? Play Elite. Elite is beyond good as far as combat and control balance is concerned.

Star Citizen is an arcade shooter mess with so many broken issues. And you know what? Plenty of it is due to CryEngine, I'm sure about that. But that's no excuse. That's no excuse for the flat out lies Chris Roberts and Company told when they were asking for money.

They said it would be a sim. They said it would be hardcore. They said it would be controller agnostic. It is and looks like it is not going to be any of these.

At least we have Elite. That's a shame... because I'd rather have both.


Lastly, if 65% of the player base (We have POLLS to support this! Lots of POLLS) wants Joystick support and there is one input scheme that ridiculously imbalances the game, there are two solutions:

1. Dumb down gameplay for Joystick users to make Joysticks viable.
2. Nerf mouse input to make it balanced with the other schemes.

Elite does this beautifully. If you haven't played Elite, you should. Elite hasn't made the mouse and keyboard useless. They instead made it equally balanced. That's all RSI needs to do.

[Heffay]

Sorry, but you don't have polls. You have self selected forum posts that are only answered by people who care enough to say they are unhappy, which is a tiny fraction of the overall player base. Everyone else just doesn't care enough to answer it. It's not even an accurate subset of the overall population. It STRICTLY consists of only the most vocal of the tiny minority who happen to be on the forums that even CARE about joysticks.

I'm a big fan of ED, but the control system does drive me nuts. The lack of precision from having a nerfed mouse is very frustrating.

The whole simple vs complex debate is just marketing from the pro joystick crowd. Don't believe your own hype. Complexity has absolutely NOTHING to do with controller input. It's implemented through game play. Shield and weapon management, stealth, positioning, teamwork, radar use, yadda yadda yadda. That is where complexity comes from, not "herpa derpa got a phallus replacement between my legs which I'm tugging on vigorously SO COMPLEX!!!!!"

It's a sim. It can be hardcore depending on how they implement game play. And controller agnostic... well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, and if they rightly ignore that just so they cater to the 99% of the people who DO care about game play, well I'll say they made the right decision on 3 of 3 items they listed.