195 replies to this topic

[RestosIII]

Bombast, on 25 December 2016 - 09:28 AM, said:

No one can ever agree on what AAA+ even means.

I like to think of this every time someone mentions AAA.



Imagining almost everyone in the gaming community as insurance salesmen really helps set the tone for my conversations.

[Wintersdark]

Alan Davion, on 24 December 2016 - 09:41 PM, said:

All down to the scale.

For instance, I don't see MW5:M putting you at the controls of your Dropships and/or Jumpships, especially because it would literally take DAYS to leave a planet and travel to your jumpship in stationary orbit above the systems star.

i.e. it will be like previous MW games, sure it'll look great, but it will ultimately be limited in scale and scope.

Star Citizen on the other hand, exploration is gonna be a big thing there. Finding mineral rich asteroids, finding jump points to new, undiscovered star systems. It could very well take weeks to chart an entirely new star system after you find it.

And that's even with a sizable organization putting all its resources behind such a project.

No; I meant that PGI may release their single player game - MW5 - before CIG released THEIR single player game (Squadron 42). Not before Star Citizen - I'm SURE MW5 will be released before Star Citizen is. But of course, as there's a huge scale difference there.

[Wintersdark]

QuantumButler, on 25 December 2016 - 03:51 AM, said:

It's not even how long it's taking, it's all the stuff you hear, like that whole celebrity face motion capture studio, or scrapping starmarine completely at least once and redoing it all over again [at least that's out now...], or now up and swapping the whole game engine, which is not just a plug and play affair contrary to what people might think, the engine change represnetins at least months more development time, thousands and thousands of man hours spent on QA, writing code, scripting, all needing to be completely redone for the new engine, which will differ vastly from what CIG has been working with so far even if they're both originally based on cryengine.

No way that doesn't take at least 4-5 months, more likely a year.

Gaming history is full of examples of games going through this sort of trouble development being mediocre to very, very bad once they do finally come out. There are a few exceptions but those by and large involved the game getting given to some other very talented team who then fix up the mess left by the development hell and polish it into something worthwhile.

Freelancer only got released after Roberts was removed and the jumbled puzzle pieces where given to someone else to fit together.

While it's not certain that SC will vanish into vapourware or be terrible, this is really where much of my concern comes in.

Arena Commander, Star Marine; these are only barely games - Arena Commander is essentially MWO with nothing but the bare bones combat using only a portion of the ships being sold, while Star Marine is a bog standard FPS. Now, as components of a larger game that's fine, but individually they're not nearly enough.

The hard reality is that in almost (* And I say almost because I'm sure there's an example where this isn't true somewhere, I can't think of it) every instance where games are delayed year after year and engine changes happen as a result of (and/or causing) that, those games end up being depressing messes where people are left with "That's it? All that money, all those years, and THIS is what you give us?"

And this is the problem. So much of the time in development cycles like this is re-doing work that's already been done. The longer development goes, the more often this has to be done. Thus, each extra year adds less and less actual development and ever more redundancy.

Maybe Star Citizen will break that mold. Maybe. I hope so, to be sure - I want SC to be the game I dreamt of ever since playing Wing Commander 1 back in the day. But I really, really doubt it.

Not just a good space combat game - those happen all the time, and while that's great and all, that's not what Star Citizen is supposed to be; merely a fragment of it. Elite does that, and does it pretty well; and we can always look back at the glory of Freelancer and Tie Fighter.

But a world of great trailers and "gameplay videos" don't make me feel better. I've been gaming basically as long as there have been video games, and for as long as there have been "gameplay videos" showcasing games in development, there have been games that fail to live up to those videos (again, essentially all of them).


Game development, even of great games, is often very disappointing on reveal, and the more hyped something gets, the more developers talk it up, the more money and time goes in, it seems the more disappointing they end up being.

Fable. Spore. DNF. NMS. MWO. PotBS(a marvelous example of feature creep destroying something awesome). I could go on and on.

Edited by Wintersdark, 25 December 2016 - 10:06 AM.

[Unnatural Growth]

Acehilator, on 25 December 2016 - 09:09 AM, said:

Wow, and the uninformed drivel continues. Page 1, post 8, it was already stated that the switch to Lumberyard is already complete. Update 2.6 was rolled out a few days ago, which runs on the the new build. And on pretty much all following pages up to page 8, people still blather on about six months of delay because of the engine switch.

Just let it go. They'll never get it, because they don't bother to actually read anything.

I'm sure they'll all be on here posting the "We Were So Wrong" threads, when SC finally completes (whenever that is).

Meanwhile, MWO still will not have delivered half of what they originally promised the founders, and only a quarter of what they promised for CW during the launch party.

And I'm sure MW5 will be in "beta" by then....

[An Innocent Urbie]

Wintersdark, on 25 December 2016 - 09:54 AM, said:

While it's not certain that SC will vanish into vapourware or be terrible, this is really where much of my concern comes in.

Arena Commander, Star Marine; these are only barely games - Arena Commander is essentially MWO with nothing but the bare bones combat using only a portion of the ships being sold, while Star Marine is a bog standard FPS. Now, as components of a larger game that's fine, but individually they're not nearly enough.

The hard reality is that in almost (* And I say almost because I'm sure there's an example where this isn't true somewhere, I can't think of it) every instance where games are delayed year after year and engine changes happen as a result of (and/or causing) that, those games end up being depressing messes where people are left with "That's it? All that money, all those years, and THIS is what you give us?"

And this is the problem. So much of the time in development cycles like this is re-doing work that's already been done. The longer development goes, the more often this has to be done. Thus, each extra year adds less and less actual development and ever more redundancy.

Maybe Star Citizen will break that mold. Maybe. I hope so, to be sure - I want SC to be the game I dreamt of ever since playing Wing Commander 1 back in the day. But I really, really doubt it.

Not just a good space combat game - those happen all the time, and while that's great and all, that's not what Star Citizen is supposed to be; merely a fragment of it. Elite does that, and does it pretty well; and we can always look back at the glory of Freelancer and Tie Fighter.

But a world of great trailers and "gameplay videos" don't make me feel better. I've been gaming basically as long as there have been video games, and for as long as there have been "gameplay videos" showcasing games in development, there have been games that fail to live up to those videos (again, essentially all of them).



Remember Fable? The first one, all they talked about during development? Then the game that was delivered? Yeah.

That is because star citizen/sq42 is 90% movie 10% game
Croberts is a wannabe Hollywood director and because Kevin Costner have filed lawsuit on him he is now using games to come back to Hollywood

OldOrgandonor, on 25 December 2016 - 10:02 AM, said:

Just let it go. They'll never get it, because they don't bother to actually read anything.

I'm sure they'll all be on here posting the "We Were So Wrong" threads, when SC finally completes (whenever that is).

Meanwhile, MWO still will not have delivered half of what they originally promised the founders, and only a quarter of what they promised for CW during the launch party.

And I'm sure MW5 will be in "beta" by then....

What is there to read?

[Unnatural Growth]

An Innocent Urbie, on 25 December 2016 - 10:05 AM, said:

What is there to read?

Exactly.

Quoted for excellence. Way to illustrate my point precisely.

[Wintersdark]

OldOrgandonor, on 25 December 2016 - 10:02 AM, said:

Just let it go. They'll never get it, because they don't bother to actually read anything.

I'm sure they'll all be on here posting the "We Were So Wrong" threads, when SC finally completes (whenever that is).

If that happens, then that's just great. I'd be ecstatic to be totally wrong.

Quote

Meanwhile, MWO still will not have delivered half of what they originally promised the founders, and only a quarter of what they promised for CW during the launch party.

And I'm sure MW5 will be in "beta" by then....

But at least it delivered what it did on 1/30th of the cost and a tiny fraction of the time. I make no excuses for MWO, and indeed hold MWO as an example of what to expect from Star Citizen, because MWO isn't unique, it's actually very normal.

But keep on keeping on, and hold the faith! I sincerely hope that - against all odds - you're right.


It doesn't matter, though - crusading for them (or even against them) isn't going to make any difference at all. They'll release (or not), the game will be awesome (or not) but if they can't make a good game with the money and time they have, they're never going to make a good game. I will certainly not accept "Oh, there was too much bad press, and we stopped selling ships, so we couldn't finish development" as an excuse.

[Wintersdark]

OldOrgandonor, on 25 December 2016 - 10:07 AM, said:

Exactly.

Quoted for excellence. Way to illustrate my point precisely.

I've read all of the press releases and RSI devlogs and such.

But the difference here is that I'm reading them from a neutral standpoint. (Edit: That means, taking what they say with a grain of salt, but not assuming it's malicious lies - ALL press releases are ultimately self serving after all)

Because it's in their best interest to spin everything as positive as possible and outright lie if necessary, as doing so provides them with income. Now, I'm not going to go all tinfoil hat an imply that CIG is just making videos and such to keep selling ships for a game they have no intention to complete. I honestly believe that Roberts has the best of intentions, and WANTS to make the JesusGame he's selling.

I just think it's extremely unlikely it's going to work out well.

Until there are independent gameplay sessions showing the actual game (persistent universe, the MMO) actually working, as far as I'm concerned it's a couple low-effort modules to keep people involved and maintain hype while they spin their tires.

Putting money into it now is the height of foolishness. But some people never learn - either because they just want it so badly, because they're too young to have seen this cycle play out dozens of times at smaller scales, or just because they have a very selective memory...

But I saw MANY really awesome "gameplay videos" and dev trailers of DNF over the years. So, forgive me if I can't get too excited by that when a game is delayed so many times, for so long; when there's so many changes and rewrites, etc. Having "Good Explainations" for everything doesn't change things.

Like I said, I can spend all day listing titles that have been overhyped and underdelivered, games destroyed by featurecreep, by delays and rewrites...

But, maybe SC will be different!

Edited by Wintersdark, 25 December 2016 - 10:22 AM.

[Unnatural Growth]

Winter,

I actually don't think we're much apart on all this in opinion. I'm certainly NOT a crusading white knight for SC (I'm sure some are too eager to label me that way so they can just pigeon hole what I'm saying and ignore it). I've given SC all the money I'm going to give, but I'm also of the opinion that they will deliver what they say. Maybe they won't, but I believe they will.

However, what still just slays me with ironic humor is the MORONS on here that are hand wringing, baying like donkeys, and pointing as an example about the "engine change" SC HAS ALREADY FINISHED as proof that there's going to be another delay of 6 months to a year.

Just cracks me up totally.

Hey boys, that engine change? It's already done. Do you get that now? I know reading is damn tough for some of you, so...

That.

Engine.

Change?

It's.

Already.

Finished.

Do you get it now? Btw, that engine change? It's already done.

Details are such funny things. Especially when you don't bother to read.

[Acehilator]

An Innocent Urbie, on 25 December 2016 - 09:20 AM, said:

LOL! You still believe what croberts tells you? The sunk cost fallacy is strong in this one

Why wouldn't I? Contrary to Russ, he hasn't lied to me yet (as far as I can tell at his point in time). But I don't think after four years something major will come up in that regard. And feature creep followed by pushing the relase date doesn't count as lying, sorry. He was clear from the start that he would try to push the envelope as much as possible with the money available.

Bombast, on 25 December 2016 - 09:28 AM, said:

You have lost your mind, sir. Completely.

Also, I think we all need to agree to stop using the AAA scale for video games, seeing as it's a completely meaningless term. It started as a testament to how much money was being spent, then progressed to being the video game version of 'Blockbuster,' then was just what you called games made by big studies (As opposed to Indie titles), and now it's just meaningless garbage spewed about. No one can ever agree on what AAA+ even means.

My mind if fine, thanks. Regarding what you said, pretty much my point. If we want to continue using AAA as it has been used in the last years, we are going to need another label for SC. And apart from SC and maybe Cyberpunk 2077 there is nothing in the works (that I know of) that may be able to earn that label. Everything is pretty much same old, same old when looking at concepts or gameplay detail.

[Johnny Z]

Well on the bright side I guess Star Citizen is going into its 5th year? Cant be to long now right?

When will everything hit the fan? Going into 6th year?

Also I think MechWarrior Online could be twice the game it is. They are not rushing anything for this game either.

Mount and Blade: Bannerlord will be epic unless they outright trash it and that is being delayed to the point of jokes made and no one has spent a dollar because they wont allow preorders.

Mass Effect Andromeda also sure to be awesome has also been delayed. Preorders pour in for that and will likely break Fallout 4's record of money made on first day of over 750 million.

Star Wars games are arena crap with power ups... 5 studios working on Star Wars games and this to date is all players have, don't even mention the complete trash that TOR is.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the bright light in all of this with building time being very reasonable at this point but no launch date announced and complete media blackout.

Another space ship, space trading privateering game not well known but is the most interesting of all of this is the game based on the Firefly Universe. Right in the middle of development with app complete and selling and already sold founders purchases, they go complete media silent. Already shown alpha screens, big budget spent on voice acting, with extremely well known actors and actresses, complete silence out of no where. Players spent money have no idea whats going on for like years. Its on Steam check it out. The app for the game is called Firefly Online Cortex and was related mini game. The big debate on the Steam forums is if the game is still being made or not.. I guess it was being made by FOX, some big names involved.









The app:

Edited by Johnny Z, 25 December 2016 - 04:24 PM.

[Alan Davion]

Johnny Z, on 25 December 2016 - 03:27 PM, said:

Also I think MechWarrior Online could be twice the game it is. They are not rushing anything for this game either.

MWO will only be twice the game it is now when it's finally wrested from PGI's lazy and incompetent grasp.

[An Innocent Urbie]

Acehilator, on 25 December 2016 - 12:54 PM, said:

Why wouldn't I? Contrary to Russ, he hasn't lied to me yet (as far as I can tell at his point in time). But I don't think after four years something major will come up in that regard. And feature creep followed by pushing the relase date doesn't count as lying, sorry. He was clear from the start that he would try to push the envelope as much as possible with the money available.




My mind if fine, thanks. Regarding what you said, pretty much my point. If we want to continue using AAA as it has been used in the last years, we are going to need another label for SC. And apart from SC and maybe Cyberpunk 2077 there is nothing in the works (that I know of) that may be able to earn that label. Everything is pretty much same old, same old when looking at concepts or gameplay detail.

LTI not coming back
State of the game(star Marine, sq42)
And more


Also being a self proclaimed transparent company they sure are very transparent about switching game engine which happened last February and only to be announced thisonth, because of what. NDA? Partnership thingy?

Maddof, Gecko and Roberts have a thing in common

[Fleeb the Mad]

As a founder from the closed beta days I hold a stigma for pre-orders in general due to my experiences with MWO. A hundred bucks was a lot for a game of any sort to command, when I can get two full feature titles for the same amount

What MWO delivered on 'launch' was disappointing, though my personal opinion of the development has changed in recent years. MWO offers the best balanced and most polished mech combat in any mechwarrior game. I've been here since the original. Faction warfare isn't what I want it to be, though it exists and is functional in the sense that you can play games on it. Sure, I'd love it if there was a faction economy and strategic objectives similar to World War Two Online, but that's probably a pipe dream for something that doesn't actually draw most of MWO's player base. What they had in 2014 was probably what they actually needed to release out of closed beta to avoid the negative press. It took them a long time to deliver, but I like MWO for what it is now.

I also know people who are neck-deep in Star Citizen who've tried to get me to come on board. I'm sorry folks, but the prognosis from someone who doesn't buy Chris Roberts' developer cred isn't good. His name is attached to some good titles from twenty years ago. I played some of them. Though his track record as a developer isn't actually stellar. I'm not even sure I'd say it was good, based on what I know. Star Citizen is a project that is well-funded but whose development cycle keeps getting longer the more funding is injected. That is not a good sign. It implies they're not very effective at managing their projects, since numerous parts of it are supposed to be in simultaneous development.

Having to scrap their FPS element and start over because it 'wasn't fun' seems to be a sign of bad upper-level decision making, because that element of it should be very straightforward from a technical standpoint. They have the money to get the people with the experience.

This latest thing about an engine change is a fairly worrisome red flag. They're being very careful about their PR because of the revenue that their fanbase keeps generating. Negative news will fan a lot of fires among the whales. Even if it already happened at the time they announced it, it probably means they've been working on it for months behind the scenes and that in itself may be a reason they haven't had much new to show lately. The question is how much of the previous year or two was abandoned or put towards that transition? The fact the transition has been supposedly made doesn't mean they aren't still behind where they would have otherwise been. It also doesn't mean that all the parts that haven't been released yet have also successfully transitioned.

I suppose people can beat on MWO all they want for bad decisions made years ago. They made bad decisions and under-delivered on their launch product. Star Citizen is something I watch from a distance because it seems to have the hallmarks of a troubled production, regardless of what people want to believe. Having a big pile of money should mean less problems if their management is effective. Whether or not they launch with a disappointing product is a question of if the dev team is going to keep moving the goal posts or not. I can't think of anything in recent memory that actually has lived up to pre-release hype and that in itself should be a warning to a lot of people.

[Otto Cannon]

Like any sane person, I'd like both SC and MWO to succeed and be the best games possible.

I think SC have actually done well on the technical side of things so far. If they mess the game up (which is perfectly possible, but not certain based on the current evidence) it'll be more likely to happen because they misjudge gameplay mechanics and community dynamics. Those are the weak points where you need smart decisions and clear thinking, and technical expertise or a big budget can't help you.

For reference, this is some of what Chris Roberts said about Lumberyard:

"Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from the exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen."

[BLOOD WOLF]

Alan Davion, on 25 December 2016 - 04:31 PM, said:

from PGI's lazy and incompetent grasp.

wow the hubris of some people.

They are not lazy, or incompetent. The only incompetence comes from the guy who I just quoted.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 26 December 2016 - 02:04 AM.

[Navid A1]

BLOOD WOLF, on 26 December 2016 - 01:59 AM, said:

wow the hubris of some people.

They are not lazy, or incompetent. The only incompetence comes from the guy who I just quoted.

Hmmm...
that makes the people behind Mechwarrior: LL, GODs among us mortals then.... you know.. the guys who created a mod in their free time, which turned out to be better than whole MW games designed by professional studios on tons of money through a decade of explosive progress in game development!!!


Although it should be noted that, one of the only things PGI has that is going for them is their nice and super talented artists. Those guys are not lazy and definitely not incompetent.


Edit:
Do you know the guy you quoted?
Have you worked with PGI staff before?

Or did you just made a baseless conclusion?!

Edited by Navid A1, 26 December 2016 - 02:21 AM.

[BLOOD WOLF]

damn, on top of every post I make, glad to know you follow my post.

number 1, does the person in question know the competence level of the designers? Or was that a baseless statement he made.

Its not just their art, by the way.

I actually don't feel like drilling your post, so you're lucky.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 26 December 2016 - 02:24 AM.

[Unnatural Growth]

Otto Cannon, on 25 December 2016 - 11:47 PM, said:

Like any sane person, I'd like both SC and MWO to succeed and be the best games possible.

I think SC have actually done well on the technical side of things so far. If they mess the game up (which is perfectly possible, but not certain based on the current evidence) it'll be more likely to happen because they misjudge gameplay mechanics and community dynamics. Those are the weak points where you need smart decisions and clear thinking, and technical expertise or a big budget can't help you.

For reference, this is some of what Chris Roberts said about Lumberyard:

"Lumberyard and StarEngine are both forks from the exactly the SAME build of CryEngine.

We stopped taking new builds from Crytek towards the end of 2015. So did Amazon. Because of this the core of the engine that we use is the same one that Amazon use and the switch was painless (I think it took us a day or so of two engineers on the engine team). What runs Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is our heavily modified version of the engine which we have dubbed StarEngine, just now our foundation is Lumberyard not CryEngine. None of our work was thrown away or modified. We switched the like for like parts of the engine from CryEngine to Lumberyard. All of our bespoke work from 64 bit precision, new rendering and planet tech, Item / Entity 2.0, Local Physics Grids, Zone System, Object Containers and so on were unaffected and remain unique to Star Citizen."

Just pointing out some of the FACTS for those of you with near-terminal cases of bad reading skills and poor reading comprehension.

As I said earlier, facts are funny things, especially when you don't bother to learn any. All this information is/was available on their site, all you had to do was bother to look for it. I know it's a strange concept, a game developer that actually puts information on the state of their game, on their own website for easy access. I can see how those used to "The MWO Way", are confused by this.

[BLOOD WOLF]

OldOrgandonor, on 26 December 2016 - 04:20 AM, said:

"The MWO Way", are confused by this.

MWO doesn't put the state of their game on their site?

They have starting with the recent patch notes and items added in the game tab, and it goes back to the first ones so you can get a overview of how the game has developed.

whoops, guess you were just confused.

Edited by BLOOD WOLF, 26 December 2016 - 04:28 AM.