I seriously believe the biggest problem with Star Citizen development is there is no clear definition of what "done" looks like.
Yes. There is no "done" state. They just want to keep going, and as long as they have the money, they will.
I know the feeling very well (without having the money), but as a professional CG artist for 15 years, I learned when I gotta say ENough. It's done.
With all the "it's just tier-0, wait for the actually good version" bullshit (it's bs because it contradicts the mantra they been pushing for the last 3-4 years that they want to give us more polished closer to final stuff) this won't end. Ever. (which would be okay for reasons below but..)
While they keep re inventing everything, the industry chugs along and does those things better, and invent new cool stuff. They do only one thing at a time, but as SC wants to be everything, it adds up pretty fast.
Case in point, the on-foot traversal update. Multiple FPS games started doing more freeflowing jumps (like I mentioned with new Doom), climbing, ledge-grabs and such, so now they must implement it to keep up. It's gonna take a lot of work. New mocap, pushing that to the skeleton and anim flow, fixing the skins to not deform stupidly with the new poses, new systems programmed that determine if a surface can be used for ledge grabs (I hope at least it's procedural and not hand-marked).. That's a shitton of work just to keep up with something that was cool 4-5 years ago.
And that's not counting the constant new additions that CR just pulls out of his hat that he wants to see developed to a sometimes ridiculous detail level.
It's what makes SC unique and immersive as nothing I played in many years, but it's also what ensures we won't have a finished state for years and years to come.
All of the above wouldn't be an issue if they went far enough with the tier-0 stuff that it consistently works, so we could play the game without so much frustration while they are doing this constant dance.
Is there even a tier-1 of anything in the game? So far every time they could have spent on fleshing out a tier1, they seem to be spending on reworking something to t0 again or adding idiotic stuff like a lightning guns, while we don't even add any reason to use those...
The only single exception seems to be Mining which is at a pretty good complex but fun state right now. I expect they will scrap it soon to do "even better" t0 of it.
lemme give you a short list of the smaller tasks that comes to mind of what needs to be done by CIG in the next N+1 years:
-cargo refactor (and possibly rework again cos we won't like it or it won't make sense etc..)
-rework every component again so they have repair/engineer gameplay
-rework every ship again to accept and support above comps
-rework every planet, possibly city, cos Roads will come
-(possibly) rework every weapon to have repair/upgrade gameplay (cos fallout has it so why not have the chance to add bigger barrels to guns and such)
-rework Flight AI as they do Ground AI
-add and later rework exploration/scanning gameplay
-add building player outpost (which was coming along pretty well last year)
-rework player outposts to support repair and power gameplay
-add the new power gameplay
-add and rework the bounty hunting stuff, cryo chambers and such
-add salvage tier 1, thus rework every ship again
-etc.
And I haven't even included the big stuff, like interstellar travel, subsumption AI, quanta, bartender, , "random encounters", commerce/trading rework...
You can all come up with more stuff that you heard they want/need to do...
I feel like I'm at the breaking point where I just had enough of this. Unless they show something FINISHED soon, I'll be joining the Kotaku staff...
