3.0 schedule update 291bugs/tasks

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Yeah and they have had years to do just that. People make out its all new when it isnt.

Planets being so large is a real problem for content but even so I hope the pioneer will help. Imagine having the whole moon as a map to explore? You might land a few times check a few ore samples but mainly your going to fly around it because of the scale.

I would suppose the "years" in question where spent building the tools and systems able to create what we are talking about.

When you say "We've been able to drive cars on the ground for years in video games" you say it like we have been able to do it the SC way for years and years... Well we havn't. Not even close - please take in to account the fact you'll be able to drive that car on a moon larger than the size of a hundred thousand driving stages in any game you have played up to this point, without loading screens from one area to another. Additionally, you can drive your car onto a spacecraft and take it to another moon 100,000 times the size of any driving stage you have ever played in your life, including sandbox games, and you should be able to do that countless times in 100 systems across the 'verse. And then you'll be able to take it to any one of a few hundred planets 500,000 times the size of any driving stage you have played in your life so far, and drive around those, too.

That kind of thing does not exist yet.
It has to be built.
Not only does it have to be built, as it doesn't exist yet the things they build it out of have to be built as well.
And most likely the tools they use to build the things to build it, will have to be built too.

Potentially after SC is created and all these tools are available to other developers, Games may take on a whole new scope - Imagine looking back on Skyrim and saying to yourself "Well, after SC it's just a little bit small, isn't it?" considering the whole Skyrim Map can fit in a single crater on Yela.

3.0 seems to be where we can finally see where the tooling has and needs to get to. And it has all been made possible not because of some far seeing studio, but because of a kickstarter where the backers can see the value in what is being created.

As for size and content, the procedurally built nature of the 'verse will take care of the parts that do and don't have content. A desert can have hundreds of thousands of miles of sand only to reveal a crashed airliner. Even cities are mostly content-less. Walk through a housing estate you don't live on - how many of those houses can you actually interact with? Maybe 65% depending on how many people are in at the time. How many do you want to interact with? Well zero, you don't know them and they don't know you, what, are you going to introduce yourself as a bored gamer and invite yourself in for tea and biscuits? You'd be up on harassment charges.

Interacting with spaceships in the game like they were objects rather than different levels of the game without loading screens or whatever was one of the earliest objectives and we saw that early on in the PU with multicrew ship interiors. Now we are taking it for granted but what other game can you enter a vehicle from outside and wonder around in it while another player pilots it and then EVA over to another ship another player is flying and get in to that one? I can't think of any, the first time I stowed away on a Starfarer I got a bit of a shock when I tried to get out and found I was millions of km from the ship spawning point...

I hope the above has helped to give you fresh hope for the project. It's a massive undertaking. They are getting somewhere and while they have been making the tools to build the game, they have been making things like new graphics techniques which I personally hope can be licensed to other companies who want to use them and make another revenue stream for the game to run and run and run.

Unfortunately, the one big thing all this takes that the backers can't supply, is time.

 

[Crymsan]

I can see we come at this from a different place. I am glad your still a fanbois but I do not think there is much they can do to put any rose tinted glasses back on for me. Sadly whilst I hope its a great game (I am still very much invested and haven't requested a refund yet), my enthusiasm and expectation has run into Chris Roberts expectation management which is at best woeful.

A whole year later both conferences still just showed planet tech again the same as the conferences last year. I am supposed to be excited about 2 idris fighting?. I sure hope they are hiding a ton of progress but I realistically do not think that's the case. He is still talking about quarterly releases when his team cannot manage one in a year (and despite his both 2.6 an d 3.0 where being done in tandem for December 2016!!!!! release ha yeah right, given what we have seen with bug fixing (Yes its difficult), the content would have to be a year old from the development team to give the bug fixers enough time.

Not even the ship timetable has kept up. Even a relatively small ship like the cutlass is taking a very long time.

 

[Vavrik]

I partly agree with @Crymsan here. It's not 100% unexpected that people are starting to feel this way. I *think* CIG has noted this, there are signs that they're trying. That's a good thing, but if this isn't ingrained in their culture by now, it will be difficult. This is too long but I got it off my chest. Skip down to the last two paragraphs if you don't want all the gory details.

Some of the things I noticed:
Generally

• CIG has been very detail oriented. Just to draw a comparison, there is another project that started at about the same time 2012, and had very similar goals. This is a product called Elite Dangerous. It had a release in 2015. The software is also alpha, but it their team focused on the low hanging fruit, namely playability. This is in contrast to CIG who focus on the hard parts, the detail. So while Elite Dangerous has had about as much effort put into the game, it is playable, with a fairly low level of detail - enough to get by. Star Citizen on the other hand, has a high level of detail, but isn't very playable in comparison. This is the 80/20 rule at play. Both projects will ultimately take about the same effort overall, but the ED team focused on the 80% that takes 20% of the project resources, and the SC team is focused on the 20% that takes 80% of the resources.

Project Methodology.

• It's very easy to kid yourself into thinking you're Agile if you use the terminology and hold daily "SCRUM" meetings. But they also have people with the title "Project Manager"... and project management is counter to Agile methodologies - and is an indicator that you're actually operating in a modified waterfall "monolithic" environment. One of the characteristics of a waterfall environment is that the project surfaces only occasionally, once a certain level of development is complete. First at the beginning of a development cycle, then at the Go Live... and typically if it's a modified waterfall, the software did not deliver all of the content because it encountered issues and overruns along the way - and everyone is disappointing, etc. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
• The other issue here is that I have seen in video's where the Product Owner is making development decisions. That is not his role and it introduces a very high risk that the development process can be impacted negatively.
• If they are Agile, then they would be able to deliver content on a sprint by sprint basis, that is the purpose of Agile methodologies. That's 2 to 4 weeks between content delivery cycles. That they see only Quarterly releases, and previously could not deliver even that tells me also they're using a modified waterfall approach.

Development Culture

• We watch a video every week, in which they show a developer going through the steps of fixing a bug, or implementing a feature. You know that not once in those videos have I ever seen one of the developers execute a unit test? Not once. This is the role of the developer, not the QA team. the QA team needs to focus on QA, and the developers need to focus on QC. The correct best practice is, Unit test as part of the development cycle, and system test as part of the QA cycle.
• This assumes that the requirements are written in such a way that they are testable, because the unit testing needs to be done against the requirement story.

What does all this mean? Well, my prediction is that both Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen will eventually reach a state where both games are more or less equal in terms of development, and we will have much of the promised content in both games. But in neither case will it occur before 2020, and I'm not predicting it will occur in 2020. It's just that Elite Dangerous won't be as detailed, but will be more playable until this occurs - OR CIG changes it's methodologies. By the way, they are not identical games. Star Citizen has a much wider scope, and more meaningful definition of the possible occupations. I think ED is more "progression" game, and Star Citizen is more User created "Sandbox". If you were around in 2004, you might remember how the game Sims Online (a more progression game) was pretty much crushed by Second Life (User created sandbox in the same genre).

There was a cluster of about 23 games that I know of, and followed that started in the 2010-2015 time frame. Most are duds. Some are complete flops, and any investment was lost. for about the last year, I follow only 4, and I think all 4 of these will actually make it. The other two I follow:

• Infinity: Battlescape, the oldest of the 23, which may actually have been the inspiration for most of the others, including both SC and ED. It started first, or close to first - in 2010, and has been at least floating around since 2004. Small team, not very effective at marketing has been the biggest problem for them. (Also seems to be progression related)
• Dual Universe, which is a bit of a late bloomer although the project lead says it was thought of in 2011. They don't have a playable alpha most of the time yet. What they do is periodically invite their Gold backers to a short alpha test, and every so often they have a "playable weekend". (also seems to be sandbox model)

 

[Bambooza]

Don't forget that CIG took some huge missteps with attempting to farm out a lot of the development to other development studios for the first three years and has only with in the past year and half grown their own development studios. Not only that but they also lucked out with picking up former Crytek employees who were familiar with the Crytek engine, something the prior studios claimed to have had but truly didn't.

The second part why @Crymsan is correct that other games have achieved similar things the Crytek engine was not originally capable of handling the scale this game grew to and so a lot of the base engine needed to be rewritten as well as the tools built out that allowed designers to more easily do their job. Take for instance placing planets in a solar system is a challenging task when you need to use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out in programs like Maya. Or changing out lighting from a pinpoint to something that appears to come from far more broad of an area.

So while the art assets can be reused or enhanced on the truth is this games principle development has not been going on for long and until recently most of the tools had not been completed. Its also why a lot of the core game mechanics are just now coming online as well as why most of the ship had to be reworked as well as the armor was redesigned.

The good news is they are finally working like a normal game studio as well as having finished most of the tools required for the designers to start flushing out the content. I fully expect to see them continue to accelerate with content release. While they might have been working on the game for over 5 years now it wasn't until recently that the game left initial design and proof of concept phase.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

Yep, relatively common knowledge. So why act surprised? Just sit back relax and hurry up and wait.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

I can see we come at this from a different place. I am glad your still a fanbois but I do not think there is much they can do to put any rose tinted glasses back on for me. Sadly whilst I hope its a great game (I am still very much invested and haven't requested a refund yet), my enthusiasm and expectation has run into Chris Roberts expectation management which is at best woeful.

A whole year later both conferences still just showed planet tech again the same as the conferences last year. I am supposed to be excited about 2 idris fighting?. I sure hope they are hiding a ton of progress but I realistically do not think that's the case. He is still talking about quarterly releases when his team cannot manage one in a year (and despite his both 2.6 an d 3.0 where being done in tandem for December 2016!!!!! release ha yeah right, given what we have seen with bug fixing (Yes its difficult), the content would have to be a year old from the development team to give the bug fixers enough time.

Not even the ship timetable has kept up. Even a relatively small ship like the cutlass is taking a very long time.

I can see why you are disappointed with the whole process. I expected way more from the gamescom event and at least an announcment that we get to play with full on planets and Ai subsumption in the PU this year. But the gamescom event shows how much effort and how many new things they had to develop, from the ground up to make CR's "vision" (more of a nightmare for the devs) happen. This made me excited again!
As @Vavrik pointed out, "Product Owner is making development decisions" and that leads to nowhere in the short term, only causing delays in the schedule.
As @ Bambooza pointed it out, development just started really.
At least for what an outsider would consider the actual development of the game (making content, adding gameplay mechanics) just started really last year with the full blown engine switch and tool development, and the CitCon showed how development of many things need to happen besides blinged up spaceships and flashy lights.

My hopes are that CR can't really ask for any more features. He literally asked for the world by now, and he is getting it. What more could he want that would slow development to a crawl again lol?

So all I really want for 3.0 to be something that finally shows what the game will be like, and have actual gameplay to it. And I do mind the endless delays, but I will keep shitposting here until then.

Spoiler: Watch out, Controversy! lul

What I will say now might be very Controversial, but who cares lol:

I think by the time it's "released", at least from a market standpoint, sadly, SC will fail miserably.
-The majority of the audience will have literally grown up, and moved on. If you were in your early teens when you bought in,by the time SC comes out, you will be worried about who to bang with that night, where to party, or what to study next in some rare cases. If you were in your twenties, you will be worried about having kids and stuff, and have very little chance to sit down for hours to wander around in a huge universe. If you are older, or don't have kids and such to take up all your time, you might be alright with it though. But I'm pretty certain that those ppl won't make up for the sales lost due to the above.-
But I don't mind that. It is the first push to bring games into an actual new generation since the first modern consoles locked everything down into a mix of boring grey multiplayer shooters and dumb action games, with the only "innovation" being is every game has a "now with lootboxes" sticker on it like it's a good thing, and with all the new tech developed, the ones after SC can and will make a difference using all that new tech

 

[Michael]

This is total speculation on my part, only guessing here!

Maybe, Tasks are tasks that are already clear and "only" need to be completed. Like "task #486525: change code of mission giver from xyz to fgh"
Some of these might not be bugs at all, just stuff that needs to be done, like tweaking an already working system to work a bit better, or more conveniently.

Bugs probably means that they know there is an issue, in this case, probably a serious one, but not sure yet what's causing it and how to fix it and needs research. They have to come up with a solution before it can be turned into a "task" for someone to complete.
Tasks are probably the easier/faster part.

So you're saying that finding out how to fix that bug #15 is the task #27 and actually fixing it will be task #78? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@the other discussion. Also i think development is actually a little bit slower due to the nature of the crowdfunding scheme (in the first 1-3 years).
The first game idea was pretty basic and with the incoming cash scope got bigger and bigger (which we might or might not consider feature creep) . I have been watching the project from time to time since the kickstarter (where i didn't invest any money) and i would say the development of the game we are currently seeing, actually did start around 2014/15.
You know studios had to be set up, employes had to be found etc. While ED had a "full structure" to rely on and probably a "full concept" of how the game should be at the beginning. Also i think CR himself hasn't expected to ever get XXX Mio $.
But actually agree into the analysis of the project management, which seems to me to be a mixture of different PM ways. ( @Vavrik )
Actually i'm not sure if the "ED way" is the better one (Focusing on gameplay first adding features later), they might run into problems they can't solve with their "engine". Also from a financial aspect its probably the better approach because you can easily power down the development once the income flux is reducing.

 

[Lorddarthvik]

So you're saying that finding out how to fix that bug #15 is the task #27 and actually fixing it will be task #78? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@the other discussion. Also i think development is actually a little bit slower due to the nature of the crowdfunding scheme (in the first 1-3 years).
The first game idea was pretty basic and with the incoming cash scope got bigger and bigger (which we might or might not consider feature creep) . I have been watching the project from time to time since the kickstarter (where i didn't invest any money) and i would say the development of the game we are currently seeing, actually did start around 2014/15.
You know studios had to be set up, employes had to be found etc. While ED had a "full structure" to rely on and probably a "full concept" of how the game should be at the beginning. Also i think CR himself hasn't expected to ever get XXX Mio $.
But actually agree into the analysis of the project management, which seems to me to be a mixture of different PM ways. ( @Vavrik )
Actually i'm not sure if the "ED way" is the better one (Focusing on gameplay first adding features later), they might run into problems they can't solve with their "engine". Also from a financial aspect its probably the better approach because you can easily power down the development once the income flux is reducing.

Damn your undeniable logic! :D
Go get a beer to cure that! :beers:

@the other discussion.
Looking back at it, the first 2 years of SC development might seem like a total waste of time and money. It was very useful to them to realise what they can, and can't develop with the engine and staff they had, and to build some basic ideas/directions, but it's only now that they started working on something that may see the light of day as a full finished product.
I agree with the ED way being worse for the long term. It has been playable for a long time, I've been trying to play it since day1, but it's sooooooo boring because their universe is kinda empty! Every feature feels like it's there just so they can claim they did it, but it has almost no gameplay to them. Planetary landing, yeah they got it in. But what can you do with it? Nothing really, after you seen one alien wreck which you can't interact with or seen an "enemy base" it's all the same. There is no more gameplay to it. Dogfights are the same minimalist level, you either have the bigger ship and guns or you don't. The space trucking is kinda okay if you get missions, but finding a good custom trading route takes ages, and there is too little gameplay in that, although it's about the only way to get the funds to progress.
It's kinda tragic how much I want to love that game but get bored with it after 2-3 days again and again.
I doubt they can expend on that much further without some deep investment, and i doubt they have enough players spending on the microtransactions to support that.
This is where Star Citizens model of selling jpeg ships might be better. They get loads of money upfront and get to develop the depth and detail to fill that emptiness that makes ED kinda boring.

 

[Heartwood]

On the topic of being late for a development step:
(Another perspective)

Since 2015 i am in the process of creating a sports tournament. The businessplan aimed at starting the first test tournaments in 2016. Currently, i haven't done any tests at all, as my equipment (and the guy behind producing it) ran into multiple problems and delayed over and over again. It is not even funny anymore, how much delay has happened. I am still waiting for the first real finished version to start the next step: testing the equipment in action, which so far has not worked out well.

So if i had kickstarted the whole thing, i would have ran into the same problems with the addition of creating distrust and hate by my supporters. This experience gives me a very understanding pov on every project out there being delayed. Sometimes little things hold up the big picture. Most of the time the planned way has to be fixed and modified multiple times over.

Important for me is, what steps have been finished. And i am extremely impressd by the tools they made for building the world.

 

[Bambooza]

Looking back at it, the first 2 years of SC development might seem like a total waste of time and money. It was very useful to them to realise what they can, and can't develop with the engine and staff they had, and to build some basic ideas/directions, but it's only now that they started working on something that may see the light of day as a full finished product.

It was a waste of money and would have sunk most other kickstarter campaigns. Lucky for them they not only received far more cash then expected (which lead to a massive scope increase) but they have been successful in continue cash influx through ship sales. The other issue was the scope and direction of the game changed drastically with the influx of huge amounts of cash which lead to the years of missteps. Honestly go back and watch the original kickstarter video and you'll see the original concept was a small hornet dog fighter space sim. Of which Crytek would have been great for out of the box.

Honestly CIG has done something far beyond what was expected they could have simply produced the game as originally pitched and pocked the cash. Instead we have seen them take the cash and are attempting to create something far beyond what has been done before. And while Chris is a dreamer he does have some solid mature developers in his executive party that help to keep things on track.

I know its been a long time in development and 3.0 feels so close and yet it still has no release date. But the good news is that they have ramped up their personal and the tools which have no end user experience are complete so the amount of content that can be release will ramp up exponentially.

So you're saying that finding out how to fix that bug #15 is the task #27 and actually fixing it will be task #78? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Typically development has a one to one relationship with bugs to tasks. Of course bugs can also spawn enhancements and uncover other bugs.

This is where Star Citizens model of selling jpeg ships might be better. They get loads of money upfront and get to develop the depth and detail to fill that emptiness that makes ED kinda boring.

I agree ED runs the risk of leaving themselves unable to modify the game engine to add the depth due to the costs of refactoring.

 

[Harkuno]

99 little bugs in the code
99 little bugs
take one down
patch it around
128 little bugs in the code

 

[Michael]

I agree ED runs the risk of leaving themselves unable to modify the game engine to add the depth due to the costs of refactoring.

I have seen this problem with eve online a couple of years ago when they ran onto problems whicht their software couldn't easily solve. Devs have gone, knowledge got lost, some parts of the code seem to be lets call it "not so well documentated as it should". So thats my hope CR is trying todo better and maybe also has the ability todo with our money. Well my biggest fear for the project is currently the big massive scale multiplayer part. I'm not totally convinced that they manage to get "1000 players on one server".

 

[Michael]

On the topic of being late for a development step:
(Another perspective)

Since 2015 i am in the process of creating a sports tournament. The businessplan aimed at starting the first test tournaments in 2016. Currently, i haven't done any tests at all, as my equipment (and the guy behind producing it) ran into multiple problems and delayed over and over again. It is not even funny anymore, how much delay has happened. I am still waiting for the first real finished version to start the next step: testing the equipment in action, which so far has not worked out well.

So if i had kickstarted the whole thing, i would have ran into the same problems with the addition of creating distrust and hate by my supporters. This experience gives me a very understanding pov on every project out there being delayed. Sometimes little things hold up the big picture. Most of the time the planned way has to be fixed and modified multiple times over.

Important for me is, what steps have been finished. And i am extremely impressd by the tools they made for building the world.

I'm not sure what you're doing there but i would like to hear more.

 

[Radegast74]

Those are hilariously hideous!

I partly agree with @Crymsan here. It's not 100% unexpected that people are starting to feel this way. I *think* CIG has noted this, there are signs that they're trying. That's a good thing, but if this isn't ingrained in their culture by now, it will be difficult. This is too long but I got it off my chest. Skip down to the last two paragraphs if you don't want all the gory details.

Some of the things I noticed:
Generally

• CIG has been very detail oriented. Just to draw a comparison, there is another project that started at about the same time 2012, and had very similar goals. This is a product called Elite Dangerous. It had a release in 2015. The software is also alpha, but it their team focused on the low hanging fruit, namely playability. This is in contrast to CIG who focus on the hard parts, the detail. So while Elite Dangerous has had about as much effort put into the game, it is playable, with a fairly low level of detail - enough to get by. Star Citizen on the other hand, has a high level of detail, but isn't very playable in comparison. This is the 80/20 rule at play. Both projects will ultimately take about the same effort overall, but the ED team focused on the 80% that takes 20% of the project resources, and the SC team is focused on the 20% that takes 80% of the resources.

Project Methodology.

• It's very easy to kid yourself into thinking you're Agile if you use the terminology and hold daily "SCRUM" meetings. But they also have people with the title "Project Manager"... and project management is counter to Agile methodologies - and is an indicator that you're actually operating in a modified waterfall "monolithic" environment. One of the characteristics of a waterfall environment is that the project surfaces only occasionally, once a certain level of development is complete. First at the beginning of a development cycle, then at the Go Live... and typically if it's a modified waterfall, the software did not deliver all of the content because it encountered issues and overruns along the way - and everyone is disappointing, etc. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?
• The other issue here is that I have seen in video's where the Product Owner is making development decisions. That is not his role and it introduces a very high risk that the development process can be impacted negatively.
• If they are Agile, then they would be able to deliver content on a sprint by sprint basis, that is the purpose of Agile methodologies. That's 2 to 4 weeks between content delivery cycles. That they see only Quarterly releases, and previously could not deliver even that tells me also they're using a modified waterfall approach.

Development Culture

• We watch a video every week, in which they show a developer going through the steps of fixing a bug, or implementing a feature. You know that not once in those videos have I ever seen one of the developers execute a unit test? Not once. This is the role of the developer, not the QA team. the QA team needs to focus on QA, and the developers need to focus on QC. The correct best practice is, Unit test as part of the development cycle, and system test as part of the QA cycle.
• This assumes that the requirements are written in such a way that they are testable, because the unit testing needs to be done against the requirement story.

What does all this mean? Well, my prediction is that both Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen will eventually reach a state where both games are more or less equal in terms of development, and we will have much of the promised content in both games. But in neither case will it occur before 2020, and I'm not predicting it will occur in 2020. It's just that Elite Dangerous won't be as detailed, but will be more playable until this occurs - OR CIG changes it's methodologies. By the way, they are not identical games. Star Citizen has a much wider scope, and more meaningful definition of the possible occupations. I think ED is more "progression" game, and Star Citizen is more User created "Sandbox". If you were around in 2004, you might remember how the game Sims Online (a more progression game) was pretty much crushed by Second Life (User created sandbox in the same genre).

There was a cluster of about 23 games that I know of, and followed that started in the 2010-2015 time frame. Most are duds. Some are complete flops, and any investment was lost. for about the last year, I follow only 4, and I think all 4 of these will actually make it. The other two I follow:

• Infinity: Battlescape, the oldest of the 23, which may actually have been the inspiration for most of the others, including both SC and ED. It started first, or close to first - in 2010, and has been at least floating around since 2004. Small team, not very effective at marketing has been the biggest problem for them. (Also seems to be progression related)
• Dual Universe, which is a bit of a late bloomer although the project lead says it was thought of in 2011. They don't have a playable alpha most of the time yet. What they do is periodically invite their Gold backers to a short alpha test, and every so often they have a "playable weekend". (also seems to be sandbox model)

Don't forget that CIG took some huge missteps with attempting to farm out a lot of the development to other development studios for the first three years and has only with in the past year and half grown their own development studios. Not only that but they also lucked out with picking up former Crytek employees who were familiar with the Crytek engine, something the prior studios claimed to have had but truly didn't.

The second part why @Crymsan is correct that other games have achieved similar things the Crytek engine was not originally capable of handling the scale this game grew to and so a lot of the base engine needed to be rewritten as well as the tools built out that allowed designers to more easily do their job. Take for instance placing planets in a solar system is a challenging task when you need to use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out in programs like Maya. Or changing out lighting from a pinpoint to something that appears to come from far more broad of an area.

So while the art assets can be reused or enhanced on the truth is this games principle development has not been going on for long and until recently most of the tools had not been completed. Its also why a lot of the core game mechanics are just now coming online as well as why most of the ship had to be reworked as well as the armor was redesigned.

The good news is they are finally working like a normal game studio as well as having finished most of the tools required for the designers to start flushing out the content. I fully expect to see them continue to accelerate with content release. While they might have been working on the game for over 5 years now it wasn't until recently that the game left initial design and proof of concept phase.

So many great points! From what I have seen, the first 2 years of development really didn't produce anything, because it was all found to be inferior/couldn't scale up to the size of the universe CR wanted/wasn't detailed enough for CR. So basically, the 5-7 year game development timeframe really didn't start until late 2014/early 2015 :(

If you backed this game, you really backed CR's vision...and CR's vision is to make the BDSSE! which means it is quite expansive...BoredGamer once referred to CR as "the man who never said 'no' to an idea."

I think there are valid and not-so-valid aspects of comparing this to Elite - Dangerous. In a nutshell, all Elite wanted to be was an updated re-hash of the original Elite...don't get me wrong, that still would be a good *game*, but, it wouldn't be one where it tried to simulate living as a person in the far future...I don't think seamlessly getting out of your space ship and walking, engaging in FPS or planetary landings was ever really in the mind of Braben when he was pitching ED originally.

Re: 'project management', Star Citizen doesn't look like a game...it really looks (to me) like they are conducting it like a Hollywood movie!

I can see we come at this from a different place.
<snip>
A whole year later both conferences still just showed planet tech again the same as the conferences last year. .

But really, it wasn't the same at all. A lot of the differences are highly nuanced, but, I believe are very meaningful. My examples:
1. Now there are highly detailed planetary landscapes, before the planets were just bare,
2. The ability of NPC's to walk around the universe in a believable manner, and not sink into the ground (immersion killing, that is) is again, a big deal;
3. Procedural generation of cities...as you may have heard, they are working on making sure each one isn't a carbon copy, but that a different Casaba in a different part of a city is different, in either layout or selection.

Agani, these are highly nuanced differences, but *very important* to the immersion and gameplay aspects. Although, based on your post, I do wonder how many people want that level of detail...I know I do.

I guess the TL;DR is:
1. Elite Dangerous == McDonald's take out, Star Citizen == filet mignon cooked to your exact order...

 

[Crymsan]

Its not that I do not want the game to look nice, procedural generation stuff is fine for that just that it adds literally no content at all. Whether the pixels are rocks like last year or a building this year is that really all there is to show after another year of development. The idea of whole worlds to explore think of all the crap there is on earth a relatively small planet. Is this all the game will be flying round looking at it? Flight times are huge and yet to see stuff you sort of have to fly not too fast. So what things will be of interest will it be like driving across the USA with many hours of driving looking at the same sort of thing before finding something of interest and that's knowing where your going at the start! Nb I enjoyed my road trips across the USA but its not all interesting.

I do agree though if all we got for the investment was a McDonalds take out that's man vs food amounts of burgers or a massive rip off, I am really hoping star citizen is neither.

 

[NaffNaffBobFace]

99 little bugs in the code
99 little bugs
take one down
patch it around
128 little bugs in the code

This is my new favorite song. So catchy!

It helps that the first time I heard that tune was an episode of Eerie Indiana where Simon makes friends with an AI Cash Machine.

 

[Krystal LeChuck]

Whenever I read or hear that Elite is similar to Star Citizen in scope, I think of the Captain's Quarters in EVE. For years and years on end we've waited for those doors to open and explore the station in first person but...

 

[Bambooza]

Whenever I read or hear that Elite is similar to Star Citizen in scope, I think of the Captain's Quarters in EVE. For years and years on end we've waited for those doors to open and explore the station in first person but...

Lol it was promised back when EVE was in beta.

 

[Bambooza]

Its not that I do not want the game to look nice, procedural generation stuff is fine for that just that it adds literally no content at all. Whether the pixels are rocks like last year or a building this year is that really all there is to show after another year of development. The idea of whole worlds to explore think of all the crap there is on earth a relatively small planet. Is this all the game will be flying round looking at it? Flight times are huge and yet to see stuff you sort of have to fly not too fast. So what things will be of interest will it be like driving across the USA with many hours of driving looking at the same sort of thing before finding something of interest and that's knowing where your going at the start! Nb I enjoyed my road trips across the USA but its not all interesting.

I do agree though if all we got for the investment was a McDonalds take out that's man vs food amounts of burgers or a massive rip off, I am really hoping star citizen is neither.

It is the risk with procedural generation and one of the biggest flops with in no mans sky was the lack of content and diversity. It is one of the more exciting aspects of Star Citizen that they are only using procedural generation to create a canvas for the designers and artists to go in and add those points of interests and variation to give those who like to explore and spend hours driving or flying over landscape looking for those points. It also works towards the reward aspect in that it will take time and they will be unique adding on the pioneer and you now have the capability of building or finding terrain that suits your specific requirements. This opens up the needs for trade routes to supply the materials for building the base along with escorts to protect those haulers. It gives the pirates something to go looking for as well as caravans to rob. The existence of pirates creates the need for Bounty Hunters. So on this initially procedural generated terrain you've allowed players to create stories and their own content against the backdrop of something interesting.

Those who have played any sort of RPG know that stories and missions can only take the game so far before the repeat becomes dull, while fps maps far less in content can keep a player population engaged for years. The same can be applied here allowing the player population to create their own way to struggle against each other with enough content to great a great framework to build upon.

Of course just flying around in pretty jpegs while shooting at each other for no reason is justifiable too.

 

[Vavrik]

Of course just flying around in pretty jpegs while shooting at each other for no reason is justifiable too.

Mine are pretty PNG's. Jpeg is so yesterday.

You're right by the way, most MMO's in the grind and rep (progression games) usually become very dull very quickly, and once you reach end-game, you've pretty much been through all of the content that's going to mean anything to you. I call it the progression funnel actually. You start off in a start area, then in good games, can take any one of mutiple routes to the end. But the whole time, the area of meaningful content is getting smaller and smaller until you end up standing in one spot, with nothing meaningful to do, wondering when the next update is coming so you can do something fun again. I get too bored playing that kind of game for too long. Sorry Blizzard, but your end games generally... and continually... suck.

But I get bored with FPS too, if that's all they provide and FPS can be progression games too. Single genre games like that are exciting at first, but not forever. For me at least.

What I'm looking for, is a universe sandbox MMORPG, where the software publisher provides an infrastructure, balance, and game play opportunity, but outside of that the user community is free to determine for themselves how they want to play the game. This is what attracted me to SC in the first place. I'm not always in the mood to deal with any one particular aspect of the game you see. I want to participate in a variety of things, and have some control over when, where and how. (But make no mistake, I love pvp. I happen to like some of the other planned aspects of the game too.)