Funny you should bring up CoD. It's my favorite analogy when faced with this argument. Here's my take on the whole "vaporware" claim. There are two parts to it.
The first is that, as others have said, most of what CIG is doing has never been done before. It's genre has never existed. There are space games, sure. Most of the elements that exist in this game have occurred in other games. However, they have never gathered in the same place at the same time and in a MMO to boot. There are a million ways that programmers cheat and take shortcuts. Things like skyboxes, invisible walls, and scripted or linear gameplay are all designed to prevent the player to see the parts of the game that were never finished.
This is not a possibility in SC. Players will be going everywhere so everything needs to be completed. They can't just put up an invisible wall and stop programming the landscape past that point. The planets don't have skyboxes either. So things like day and night cycles are not prescripted movements of the light source across the skybox. It is actually the solar system's sun changing in relative position based on the orbital patterns of that world.
There are a ton of other things as well that CIG is inventing. Take airlocks for instance. Most games would have put that as a scripted event or a cut scene. SC on the other hand is developing an atmosphere system. If you can't breathe the air and you don't have your suit, you die. However, you don't die because the game says "if player is at coordinates x,y,z without a suit, play death animation 7". They die because the game sees there is no suitable air at that location. That means that every structure in the game needs to be filled with this air. Every planet needs to be supplied with an atmosphere, etc.
All these things and more are being invented from scratch. That's because, even if they have existed in other games previously, they have never been forced to coexist with all these other systems. So these new systems need to be custom made and tailored to work with the other systems in this game. I can only imagine the continual frustrations of these programmers. "I can get it to work, but it breaks this other system." I'd be willing to bet that gets stated at CIG on a daily basis. Invention takes time. It takes lots of time.
The second part of the argument against the vaporware claim, is simply opening your eyes. Actually, scratch that. Let's take a step back and ask two questions. What do you consider to be "solid content" and how much of it do you need for the game to be considered a "good value". This is where CoD comes in. I played the series for a while, but after a few games I simply got bored with it. That's because I could step forward or backward in the series and still be playing the same game. The weapons and maps would be different, but the gameplay in the series is one carbon copy after the other.
The only real difference is the storyline. The reason I kept buying the games was for the single player story. I enjoyed playing the missions just as much as the PVP portion. Unfortunately, that's where the content really started lacking. The last game I played took me less than a day to get through. I think it was ~10 hours and I was done with the story. All that was left was the matchmaking PVP aspect that all the other games had. At that point, I might as well go back to my umteenth level guy in MW2. It was the same game. So ultimately, only 10 hours or so of content existed between versions and I paid $50 for that 10 hours. I was dissapointed, but didn't feel outright ripped off. I didn't feel like that was vaporware.
So back to SC. Right now, you have a few hours of missions before you are left with only pvp. However, there are three types of pvp. You have a fairly robust ship combat system, a FPS system, and a racing system currently in place. They are all incredibly fun and sufficiently populated on a daily basis to facilitate great competition. If I allowed myself to really dig into the game right now, I could easily play this game for months without being bored.
Therein lies the rub. I could do this right now with the existing content available for $45. Let's say they released Squadron 42 next month along side 3.0. However, lets pretend that 3.0 is the final release. That means you get all the features available in 3.0, plus the entirety of Squadron 42: chapter one, as content for your $45. Let's also pretend that you don't know a single thing about future plans to expand the game. Lets pretend they have been silent like most developers until now and started an ad campaign today based on the current content. It releases in two months and nothing more is said.
It would be a earth shattering success. Would it be a little buggy? Sure, but no more buggy than 90% of the recent AAA PC releases. The bugs wouldn't interfere with it's success though. That's because in it's current form, it offers more quality content than ANY game in the last 5 years. I'd even hazard to say, you will get more hours of solid enjoyment out of your $45 than any game in the last decade.
So stop looking at the game through troll colored glasses. Stop holding CIG's transparency against them. Just because they have shared their vision of what the 100% complete game will look like, it doesn't devalue what they have already done. When you compare SC's current content to the current AAA release, the game looks spectacular just the way it is today. Stop comparing SC to its future self and instead compare it to applicable things like NMS's release, Destiny 1's release, and so on. If you do, you will see that the entire claim of SC being "vaporware" is both ridiculous and laughable.
