That’s the thing. A publisher can enforce discipline when it is needed. Unfortunately, CIG needed it 6 years ago. I would have loved the game CIG came up with prior to fully physicalized planets. It wok.d have been populated with creatures, people, plants, and all of it would have worked and worked well.
now we have barren planets devoid of almost all life, and what life is there tends to stand around on furniture.
But..Quantum will solve it all and make it better, right? Unfortunately, it won’t. If you want worlds to be alive and “thriving”, you need to have a good population density of creatures per square km. That means as people travel over the world, they need to be phasing the life in and out in a wide range. It’s not just 20-30 bad buys, but hundreds of creatures spread out over a 16 sq km area minimum per ship on that moon or planet. That’s at least several hundred life forms, if not a thousand or more. All being spawned in/out as the person overflys the area at 200 m/s.
Just how many servers does a game like WoW need for the eastern kingdoms on “one” server? I suspect it’s not “one”, but actually many, with each realm having 10-20 servers each, if not more, and that land area is a fraction of a single moon in SC.
i get his vision, but there also needs to be a plan and he seems to change that plan when his vision changes. Holy Grail tech usually isn’t. After all, we have been promised it before and look where we still are.
A publisher would impose strict deadlines yes, and also it would throw out 3/4 or more of the things that make Star Citizen unique and not just another shallow generic open world sandbox. Without physicalized planets, there is no Star Citizen. Without the 10 minute walk and bus ride to your ship, there is no Star Citizen. Without all the detail and immersion there's 30 year old mediocrity in a once expensive but now aging tattered suit. There's yet another NMS, ED, Fallout76 and whatever else did the same, all dead, it would just be a total unquestionable waste of time and money.
It would make money for a couple weeks or months at most until streamers influencers and the rest of the crowd got bored with it and switched to the next hype, just like it's happening with smaller niche games nowdays. Without all the things that make it "special", both in a good and bad way, it would be yet another shitty little indie game among literal millions of others, to be ignored.
It would get monetized hard, with skins and season pass and maybe even loot boxes, all the usual shit that is a must these days, and it would make the publisher some money, but it would die fast, and probably get it's servers shut off after 2 years max cos it wouldn't make any financial sense to keep it going.
Let's be real, none of us will agree exactly to the letter on what state the game should be released at, because we all want something at least a little bit different out of it.
In my view, we don't need anything complicated or super hard to achieve to happen for an official release of a proper good game, considering all the things we have in game today.
Actually it's super easy, barely an inconvenience! It's the simplest decision in the world.
FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED!
Even if it's only tier0.
Just fucking finish it!
That is all that's needed. The decision to end fucking around with reworks and redesigns and bloat, and finish up the Tier0 mechanics to work consistently and bug free. You don't need a publisher for that. You just need CR to say, this is what is happening from tomorrow onwards, 2 more years maybe, and that's it.
We would have a working reliable proper game that can be upgraded in the long run, because lets face it, apart from mining and maybe medical, NOTHING in the game reached even a tier0 implementation where it could be considered finished and built upon, even if they moved on to calling it next tier and bloating it even more adding bugs and crap. Not even the most basic things like traversal on foot works as it should, yet they are already reworking it from the ground up with a bunch of new features no one asked for.
If we would have this, features and mechanics and all actually finished to work consistently as intended, it would finally make sense to start complaining about how the game mechanics work, instead of how they do not work.
We don't need a publisher to achieve this. We just need a single decision.
