Nice long chat with Space Tomato about all kinds of Star Citizen stuff:
Montoya Podcast with Space Tomato
- Thread starter Montoya
- Start date
I watched the whole thing, and liked it... odd because if a video is more than 30 minutes I usually SHINY!
Oh no, what was I saying?
Oh no, what was I saying?
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Montoya... you jackass! Just kidding. I think you definitely have a lead on this type of content... Keenan did a great job keeping you on point. That said, you have a lot of ideas, good and not so good, but you convey yourself as the expert and explain yourself clearly (you always do a good job at that). One question, at what point would you say enough is enough with star citizen or is there nothing SC could do to have you change your mind - are you too invested? That is your first pod cast topic.
I liked a lot of the talking points but some things you had to say about development kind of scared me. Is what we are seeing 10 years of development? In my opinion no. Bugs that were there when they released Orisan are still prevalent like the elevator monsters, ships that blow up for no real reason, walk off your ship and you just die for no reason, the list goes on. What you described is almost exactly what happened to Duke Nukem Forever. They kept changing things and trying different engines for so long that when they finally released it no one really cared. Not to mention the fact that it was a horrible game for the franchise. I used to love Duke Nukem until that happened. I am crossing my fingers that this doesn't suddenly turn out that way. At least they don't have a publisher breathing down their back to get the product released and making them hurry I guess.
The good thing I can see is, they can take quite a bit of what they are learning from Squadron 42 and apply it to the multi-player aspect of the game so when they finish S42 it should not take as long to develop the online portion if they do things correctly.
The good thing I can see is, they can take quite a bit of what they are learning from Squadron 42 and apply it to the multi-player aspect of the game so when they finish S42 it should not take as long to develop the online portion if they do things correctly.
There is a lot of scope creep that is hampering development. But the good news is the funding model CIG has works well for this. As long as they can continue to keep us engaged and attract new paying customers the longer they have to grow the project. And in fact, I would say it's in their best interest to continue the scope creep as it's the dream of new features that are working for them.
Where projects I work on this would have ended the project and gotten a lot of people fired due to cost overrun and failure to launch to beat out the competition the only thing CIG has to worry about is failure to keep their player base engaged. And as @Montoya has shown many times the funding charts show that they are continuing to grow their funding.
The other aspect is while it has been 10 years since the announcement and initial funding it wasn't until much later and the launch of 3.0 that the scope of the game was truly flushed out and starting to be filled in. While I am concerned about tech debt as it is a hungry monster that feeds on scope creep, I have a feeling that they have a lot more complete than they have put in the PU due to not wanting to showcase things created for SQ42 as well as limited server capabilities due to the backend software having not been completed yet.
As for the bugs while they do exist and have existed for a long time this is most likely due to not having the developer resources available to put on them. While I am not sure about CIG specifically most game studios only have a half dozen software engineers while the vast majority of their employees are artists and designers.