Out of Pod Experience

Now something struck me.

If I could visually describe what I feel about Roberts life in games buisiness, I would tell that this guy started speeding on ice a long time ago, while there are a lot of serpentine turns ahead in his life, next always sharper than the previous.

Or in other words: I see a pattern where Roberts first started climbing a little horse, with the first game conceived, he have done it but it wasnt easy. Then he wanted to climb a bigger horse, his ambitions really wanted to be satiated. like a madman, he completely lost common sense when working on Freelancer. Microsoft, serious company with serious people who have seen what was going on, had to cut the destructive reign of overly ambitious Roberts.
The smaller horse he climbed with a lot of trouble, the middle one was too big for him. and now, he wants to climb the fricking elephant! Who will react in time, if ambitions and incompetency will prove to be real, signs of those we indeed had earlier...

Single player Squadron can serve as an apetizer for the SC. But for Roberts it will be also a test bed. Everyone will see what the hell was conceived and how the QUALITY (bugs, glitches, performance) behind the project looks. Maybe even Roberts will push out the game too hastily with a lot of issues, that will be patched for longer time, just to profit earlier, even furher stretching the faith of backers. Squadron will serve as funding source (i think it wil even have a microtransaction shop with stuffs, in a single player game!), together with few, but very serious SC founders, who really will fight with fervor for SC to come out, maybe they will even buy 5000$ ships, only to see their dream come true...

Hmm.

While Squadron is sheduled to come out in 2016, we could see a few slips, at least into beginning of 2017. You know, they could always say:"even big companies have issues with games, and we are only a crowd funded company under Roberts lead".

It's not really that — it's the blatant and hilarious hypocrisy of the zealots who engage in campaigns of review dumping and abuse against other games they consider a threat, and use price as an argument why SC is better.

Elite: Dangerous is perhaps the most popular target, with it's entirely normal pricing structure of base game + DLC expansions, which is decried as disgraceful and predatory even though SC has the exact same structure and nothing to show for itself. It may not be a requirement, but the simple fact remains that these are the same people who have spent thousands, even tens of thousands, on digital content for a game that doesn't exist. In spite of writing huge covetous drool-texts on the topic of their desire for some newly released concept art, they try to make the argument that these are not “purchases”, just “donations” or “pledges,” ignoring not only what they just said about wanting to buy those ships, but also ignoring the fact that CIG's store lists them as purchases and charge VAT. CIG then immediately try to suggest that these purchases aren't what the store says they are in a desperate attempt to avoid consumer laws (and they've failed pretty consistently at this) so as to not bleed too much money.


There's also the far more problematic issue of what, exactly, those purchases promise to deliver. Will the zealots really keep singing the same “it's a donation” song when it turns out that the ship balancing and game economy is such that the ships are worth $5 each? Or will CIG tune the economy such that you really do have to put in $10,000 worth of work in order to unlock a good collection of ships, and balanced the game such that these price tags make even the slightest bit of sense, in which case we'll have the most spectacular instance of P2W ever conceived in gaming history. CIG has to choose between screwing over the whales, making their ship not-purchases next to worthless or screwing over themselves by forcing new players to buy in at ridiculous prices if they want to play.

But beyond that, no-one actually knows if or how those ships can be earned in the final game. CIG says that people will be able to earn them all, but CIG says a lot of things and has a long history of not being very truthful about anything. No details of the economy are actually known, other than that it'll be player run but controlled by NPCs (which makes no sense). No details of the industry are known, other than that you will be able to collect materials and build ships (but for what purpose, when the NPCs control the market and LTI exists?) We know how much the in-game currency costs, but nothing has been revealed about how much it is actually worth. We don't know how the tiny sliver of equipment they've actually released will be balanced because by their own admission, CIG will have to redesign almost everything as more systems are completed, and all they're doing now is tweaking XML values to keep the engine from crapping itself to pieces due to how those values make the ships behave.


So nothing about the game's cost, the cost of the ships, the cost of the future expansions, or the cost of anything CIG is offering the backers have any rationale behind it… which means that it comes across as nothing but a well-crafted effort to suck as much money out of the wallets of suckers who don't understand how the pricing of games and digital goods work.

Well as I invested in Star Citizen to the tune of $400, taht was fairly early on and I want to develop my ships in game.

I am happy to see the development moving along nicely.

Two days ago me and two other ex-Eve players joined the same instance, boarded a Connie, had a fight with some other players, I was top gunner, another bottom gunner and another flew the Connie, we died because the balance of the connie is not right, but who cares its still in development and needs a balance pass that Chris Roberts already indicated will happen. It was also difficult to lock targets.

We went to a station, got out grabbed a gun and had some combat with other players, I like the seamless nature of it and while I am not happy with the ship balance I see the huge potential of the game. I have played Elite Dangerous and we had 5 ex-Eve players on at the same time with no way to interact with each other, that is not the same as Star Citizen where I was in ship with my mates.

We also went out in a small fleet which was fun too.

That game play potential is great.

I had not been on it for a while as I was playing ESO and the downloads were tedious for me, so I only check the game every so often, but the most recent check showed just how much progress has been made, to be blunt I like what I see very much.

So far? Same as before really.

When people tell me how awesome Star Citizen is going to be, I can't help but fondly remember a couple of titles that were supposed to be awesome too. Games like Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever.

In my experience, games that has been in development hell for a long time tend to suffer from two things; outdated technology and so unreasonably hyped that they just fall flat in number of sales and reviews.

Do I think Chris Robert can pull it off and deliver his vision? No. I don't, because unless Chris Roberts suddenly masters time manipulation then neither time or money is going to be an infinite resource at his disposal. But what I do think is that he is not going to repeat another 'Freelancer' release.

…which doesn't change the very simple fact that they've blown through every deadline they've set up and never been able to make a sane and sensible estimate for when anything will be done. It doesn't change the fact that they have never been able to nail down a scope. It doesn't change the fact that all they have after four years is a broken tech demo.

My knowing how big the game is has no impact on, or relevance to, how little they've done in the time they've had at their disposal.

…and they have generally moved beyond broken tech demo in that time. Just because a game takes long does not mean that it's any good. Just because it's complex does not mean it has to take a long time to make. But when, as in Chris' case, the fundamental systems are still not designed or even planned out 4 years in, and you keep restarting the design from scratch because you've had a new brilliant idea, you've ****** up and need to get back on track or you'll never actually be done.

How is that in any way relevant other than to suggest that they're mismanaging their funds as well as their time and development talent?

…then the incompetence of the SC development process becomes not just worrisome, but outright hilarious. EVE was far larger and vastly more complex, and was finished in less time than the simplistic single-player component of SC even though it was developed in a loft by a handful of drunken icelanders.

Probably less than 5% of the current EVE content was already present on release; and of that content, everything has been recoded at least once since release. The last and oldest of the original features were sun flares, which were recoded last year...

This is why I think that E:D haves a enormous potential, btw. As the quote goes (can't find the English original so I'm re-translating from Spanish): "The prototype of a superior technology is always inferior to the developed example of a inferior technology".

Yet where E:D is a empty but complete shell, SC so far is a piece of a supposed larger body...

Vaporware, really expensive vaporware.