Speed of Development

[Man-0]

Hello fellow Testies,

I am making this discussion thread in hopes of getting some of your opinions about the ongoing development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

Now, while I have been "watching" development since about 2012-ish. I haven't always been present, so i've missed some chunks of updates along the development cycle.
My point is that I don't have a full perspective of how much CiG have improved and sped up development of the game(s) initial announcement and I'd like to hear from people who have been here awhile.
I've heard countless people joke that the game wont be released for another 10 or 20 years and that their kids will inherit their fleet.

Has the speed of development sped up or slowed down in the last couple years? Last couple months?

Considering the current pace of development (frequency of updates), what do you think would be a realistic timeline to completion?

What are your Hopes/Expectations about the timeline?

How long is too long? Will players continue to be loyal to the project or will CiG eventually run out of backers? Why or why not?

Suffice to say, CiG is years ahead of the curve with the way they decided to design Star Citizen, HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that other developers can't catch up.

How long until a MAJOR game developer decide to design a similar product for mainstream audiences AND considering how much the gaming industry has grown in the last couple years they could very well have more than enough resources to do it without crowdfunding. How long until we see "viable" Clones of Star Citizen?


In my personal Opinion, with how many features and gameplay loops are planned, we could see another decade go by without a full feature release of the Persistent Universe.

I just wanted to add here at the end that I am in no way upset with CiG over the pace of progress and I'm not trying to rant about it, I really just want everyone's opinions and try to fill in the gaps in my own knowledge.

 

[Bambooza]

Speed of development has significantly speed up. The issue is a lot of the work towards the game is being masked by not wanting to spoil SQ42.

The biggest issue was the great success of the kickstarter caused them to scrap the original concept and expand the game into the behemoth we are now starting to see come to life. The biggest issue was the limitation of the CryEngine was a great pic for a standard map size/load screen but required a significant rework to allow it to handle the seamless transitions from location to location as well as the size and scope of the ships/locations in the game. Ships like the Starfarer, 890jump Carrak could easily be levels in of themselves in a standard game like mass effect.

As for the timeline I would say it wasn't until they started working on and completed 3.0 that they truly came to terms with the scope of the game they were trying to achive. While it has almost been 4 years since the release of 3.0 we have started to see them bring ships online that are fully flushed out as well as fully realized locations. The tools have also been created and are starting to significantly reduce the development time required. The best example would be the time it takes to create planets went from 6 plus months to a few weeks and at this point I imagine Pyro is mostly done and is simply waiting on server sharding to come online.

We are starting to see building blocks being flushed out as the Mercury has functional door locks, lights and HUD elements that match the ship screens. Even ship creation has sped up, and while there area number of ships still left in concept we have a lot already in the verse.

What we are lacking is is two key elements with in the server code (object storage/retrieval, server mesh) and once completed should allow developers to start adding on the missing game features.

While I would like to say it should only take a few more years to complete there is the unknown of what is happening with in SQ42 as its sucked up a significant portion of CIG's development resources and we still do not know how far along they are.

 

[Cugino83]

As Bambooza state the development speed uup significally and all the process and intereation in the development that before could (and may be ware) chaotic are now more and very flshed out: CIG has denefenetly learn to plan looking haed in the developing of SC. Model block for the UI is an example: instead of having those flash coded interface they arre now building the logical and graphical part separeted so that UI can be changed and modificed more easily. Justa few month ago we see the whole refactor of the ship HUD with the new concept and now we are already seein some change and specific manifacturer having theyr own interface.

I feel that as soon as CIG will manage to implement ichace forst and the server maching (even the first basic interaction) there will be sever features and game aspect that will be implemented one after the other at very close time one to the other.

How much time for the "full release"? Thats depend of what everyone fell the state of the game to be declared "released". For me if all the mechanics of the game are there and flashed out it will be good, doesn't matter if the PU will lack several system or some content, those things will came with after released patch like every other MMO do.

 

[Reventlov]

I've only been paying attention since 2016, so I can't speak to as far back as 2012, but from my perspective it's a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand they seem to be hitting major milestones more often - like persistence, planet tech, the mining loop, etc. In the past year it has finally started to feel like a game. On the other there is hardly a single feature that isn't riddled with major bugs, and there are still a lot of major features missing like salvage, medical, exploration, core tech, and many more forgotten promises from years past. It's all the latter that make people wonder if they'll live to see the release. There is definitely a long way to go to a polished and "complete enough" game, and the pace hasn't picked up that much. I still hold out hope that after icache they'll really be able to put a foot on the accelerator.

EDIT:
As far as hopes and expectations, I hope in the next 3 years it will be something close to complete. I expect that I really have no idea.

Elite Dangerous is flirting with first person gameplay, and they actually get things released. With more modest ambitions, I wonder if they'll start to eat into CIG's cash flow at some point.