Author Topic: Wing Commander 6: The Undiscovered Release Date (Star Citizen Thread)  (Read 589105 times)

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Offline Aesaar

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Well, Freelancer was awesome. It was unfinished and didn't have half the features promised, but boy was it awesome. I'm confident that whatever Star Citizen ends up as, it'll at least be fun to play. And unlike with Freelancer, they have a way of further developing the game after the general release. Back then, patching content updates in was simply not done (expansion packs were major affairs), but with an MMO like SC, that's the usual way to go. It's unlikely to have all the features promised at "release", but they'll probably keep updating it well after that. After some years, it might end up with most of the promised stuff added in.
Whether you think Freelancer was good or not (I don't), Chris Roberts worked on Freelancer for all of 18 months (out of 4-5 years), and it's only because he stopped working on it that the game even made it to release.  If it hadn't been for Microsoft buying his company and forcing him off the project, Digital Anvil would have gone bankrupt and the game would have gone nowhere.  He was not responsible for Freelancer, and I don't get how his name is associated with it, except as a way to show how he's making the same mistakes with SC.

The last game CR released was Starlancer, and it was not a good game.

realedit: However if you want what is looking to be a perfect Freelancer 2.0 in the sense of unfinished, likely sold to a publisher to finish and CR stepping down then look no further than Star Citizen
No publisher is going to save Star Citizen.  No publisher would ever touch a game that potentially has $90M in liabilities.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2015, 05:14:20 pm by Aesaar »

 

Offline Mikes

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Well, Freelancer was awesome. It was unfinished and didn't have half the features promised, but boy was it awesome. I'm confident that whatever Star Citizen ends up as, it'll at least be fun to play. And unlike with Freelancer, they have a way of further developing the game after the general release. Back then, patching content updates in was simply not done (expansion packs were major affairs), but with an MMO like SC, that's the usual way to go. It's unlikely to have all the features promised at "release", but they'll probably keep updating it well after that. After some years, it might end up with most of the promised stuff added in.
Whether you think Freelancer was good or not (I don't), Chris Roberts worked on Freelancer for all of 18 months (out of 4-5 years), and it's only because he stopped working on it that the game even made it to release.  If it hadn't been for Microsoft buying his company and forcing him off the project, Digital Anvil would have gone bankrupt and the game would have gone nowhere.  He was not responsible for Freelancer, and I don't get how his name is associated with it, except as a way to show how he's making the same mistakes with SC.

The last game CR released was Starlancer, and it was not a good game.

realedit: However if you want what is looking to be a perfect Freelancer 2.0 in the sense of unfinished, likely sold to a publisher to finish and CR stepping down then look no further than Star Citizen
No publisher is going to save Star Citizen.  No publisher would ever touch a game that potentially has $90M in liabilities.

Be aware that there is a point where hate starts to not look serious, but outright hilarious to anyone who reads it, especially if the quoted "facts" do not match with reality.

(Starlancer came way before Freelancer and arguably neither was half bad.)

Peace?


Don't take me wrong... I understand people being wary or sceptic and I wouldn't even call myself all THAT optimistic towards Star Citizen myself at this point.... but still ... seriously? ;-)
« Last Edit: September 27, 2015, 03:13:22 am by Mikes »

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Be aware that there is a point where hate starts to not look serious, but outright hilarious to anyone who reads it, especially if the quoted "facts" do not match with reality.

(Starlancer came way before Freelancer and arguably neither was half bad.)

Peace?


Don't take me wrong... I understand people being wary or sceptic and I wouldn't even call myself all THAT optimistic towards Star Citizen myself at this point.... but still ... seriously? ;-)
Yes, Starlancer came before Freelancer.  When did I say otherwise?  I said it's the last game CR released, which is true because he didn't release Freelancer.  He was forced off the dev team by Microsoft as part of the deal for them buying Digital Anvil in 2000, probably because his management nearly ran his company into the ground.  This isn't hate, it's literally what happened.

I don't like Freelancer, but I can see why someone might like it (especially since it's been pretty significantly modded). 

On the other hand, Starlancer wasn't half bad, it was all bad .  The AI was beyond ****, the missions were typical CR fare (ie bad), and the story managed to be more trite and cliched than Wing Commander's (without having Wing Commander's decent cast of characters).  I do not understand how anyone can defend it.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2015, 03:41:06 am by Aesaar »

 

Offline Hades

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
On the other hand, Starlancer wasn't half bad, it was all bad .  The AI was beyond ****, the missions were typical CR fare (ie bad), and te story managed to be more trite and cliched than Wing Commander's.  I do not understand how anyone can defend it.
People are willing to defend anything you know, such as monarchy or WW2 German lunchbox tanks.
[22:29] <sigtau> Hello, #hard-light?  I'm trying to tell a girl she looks really good for someone who doesn't exercise.  How do I word that non-offensively?
[22:29] <RangerKarl|AtWork> "you look like a big tasty muffin"
----
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Offline Aesaar

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
On the other hand, Starlancer wasn't half bad, it was all bad .  The AI was beyond ****, the missions were typical CR fare (ie bad), and te story managed to be more trite and cliched than Wing Commander's.  I do not understand how anyone can defend it.
People are willing to defend anything you know, such as monarchy or WW2 German lunchbox tanks.
The correct term is Nazi ****boxes.

 

Offline Deathsnake

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Nope. The last Chris Roberts Game was Wing Commander 4. On Starlancer his Brother has the full Control of the game. Chris Name just was on the cover.

Freelancer was in his mind a complete different game then the Release Version. Freelancer should have a onboard Computer with Updates you can buy and fly from System to System. If an enemy Encounter you have several tactics on you Computer and you just aiming with the mouse on hardpoints to take out weapons, engine and so on.

You could call it Open-World-Rail-Space-Combat-Simulation. We all know, this is maybe even today not possible or hard to make. For 1999 impossible. 2001 he left Anvil and goes to Hollywood. He even does not help the Freelancer Team as the press have written.
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Offline Scotty

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Freelancer was in his mind a complete different game then the Release Version.

This is literally the problem we've been pointing out for the entire discussion.  He has no concept of when to stop, and that ruins games he works on.

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Nope. The last Chris Roberts Game was Wing Commander 4. On Starlancer his Brother has the full Control of the game. Chris Name just was on the cover.
Oh, really?  I thought that was just Privateer 2.  Ok, well, on one hand, Erin is pretty good about actually releasing games.  On the other hand, it doesn't bode well for SQ42 in terms of quality.

And how Foundry 42 is making a singleplayer campaign when CIG haven't figured out a way to make their base gameplay fun is beyond me.

Quote
Freelancer was in his mind a complete different game then the Release Version. Freelancer should have a onboard Computer with Updates you can buy and fly from System to System. If an enemy Encounter you have several tactics on you Computer and you just aiming with the mouse on hardpoints to take out weapons, engine and so on.

You could call it Open-World-Rail-Space-Combat-Simulation. We all know, this is maybe even today not possible or hard to make. For 1999 impossible. 2001 he left Anvil and goes to Hollywood. He even does not help the Freelancer Team as the press have written.
  That's right, the Freelancer in his mind was impossible for the time.  But he didn't realize that, and he nearly bankrupted his company trying to make it.  It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that he's making the same mistakes again.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2015, 04:02:29 am by Aesaar »

 

Offline Mikes

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Nope. The last Chris Roberts Game was Wing Commander 4. On Starlancer his Brother has the full Control of the game. Chris Name just was on the cover.
Oh, really?  I thought that was just Privateer 2.  Ok, well, on one hand, Erin is pretty good about actually releasing games.  On the other hand, it doesn't bode well for SQ42 in terms of quality.

And how Foundry 42 is making a singleplayer campaign when CIG haven't figured out a way to make their base gameplay fun is beyond me.

Quote
Freelancer was in his mind a complete different game then the Release Version. Freelancer should have a onboard Computer with Updates you can buy and fly from System to System. If an enemy Encounter you have several tactics on you Computer and you just aiming with the mouse on hardpoints to take out weapons, engine and so on.

You could call it Open-World-Rail-Space-Combat-Simulation. We all know, this is maybe even today not possible or hard to make. For 1999 impossible. 2001 he left Anvil and goes to Hollywood. He even does not help the Freelancer Team as the press have written.
  That's right, the Freelancer in his mind was impossible for the time.  But he didn't realize that, and he nearly bankrupted his company trying to make it.  It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that he's making the same mistakes again.

And all I am saying is that I find it funny when people are all so sure about how a project will turn out before the fact ... and pretend to know exactly who is repeating what mistakes and what not ...

I believe the term is "doomsaying". And yes there is the opposite, "fanboism", i believe, too. The Star Citizen forums are a giant example of what happens when huge numbers of either team meet to battle it out and it' ain't pretty LOL.

Personally... I find either equally silly and/or idiotic at times. (And - if I had any say over it - would at least prefer that this special brand of idiocy would stay contained within the Star Citizen forums.)



We gonna see what happens to Star Citizen, when it happens, or doesn't, ain't we?

(If no meteroite hits the earth or WW3 starts and we all gonna die, ... how s that for doomsaying? lol)
« Last Edit: September 27, 2015, 05:51:19 am by Mikes »

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
There's this little thing humans are able to do.  We can look at past events, look at how and why they happened, and then use that knowledge to find similar patterns and make educated predictions about the future.  No really, humans can do this.

I could be wrong, but judging by what CIG have released, what they've promised, the information they've provided, and CR's past attempt to make a game like this, I don't think I am.  This isn't an unfounded opinion.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Mikes, you're right in saying that no one here really knows what the future is going to be exactly, so it might be the case that indeed the game will proceed well.

But, Aesaar is absolutely right too: we just have too many signs that say otherwise. His comment on how they are making the single player campaign without having nailed a fun gameplay first is astounding... it's facepalmland. Everywhere I see companies making, firstly, huge efforts in getting the gameplay right, and just then try to build a game on top of that, and only at the end will the assets come forth. All signs point to a disaster in the making, being led by someone who should be best described by having the true "reality distortion bubble" that Jobs was famous for (the difference was, Jobs delivered).

 
Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
And all I am saying is that I find it funny when people are all so sure about how a project will turn out before the fact ... and pretend to know exactly who is repeating what mistakes and what not ...

Personally I think the biggest thing to consider when analyzing a developer is his track record.

If this was a Peter Molyneux game for example, would more people consider the lofty goals to be a bit far-fetched? Would there be more doom saying?

So if Robert's last game sunk his company, and he hasn't done anything in 10-14 years since then, and his new game is the same as his old game only more ambitious in every respect then isn't there legitimate cause for concern?

Similarly people complain when for example a single player game has a tacked-on multiplayer component, they say why spend time on this when you could be improving the main game? Yet Star Citizen for example has basically added on an entirely new game with the FPS aspect.  Which is quite an ironic turn of events when you think about it considering the original pitch was essentially championing the space sim and yet the final game is tacking on an FPS.  Would people applaud a Freespace 3 which puts half its budget into a cover-based shooter like Gears of War?

The FPS module reminds me of another game actually, Daikatana. When John Romero split from iD his plan for Daikatana was all kinds of ambitious.  But later on, having missed his first deadline he got a look at Quake 1 and saw that Carmack had added lighting effects to projectiles and other new tech, so Romero was like "**** I need to improve the game and get that lighting in there!" and the game got delayed, people quit, etcetera and so forth.

Now with Star Citizen, as I understand it Star Marine was announced at PAX 2014.  Is it possible that Roberts saw say No Man's Sky in 2013, saw a man walk around on a planet, get into a ship, fly into a space battle and land on another planet and suddenly think "**** I need to improve the game and get FPS in there!".  Maybe the time line doesn't quite match up but either way it seems by going for the FPS component the game has nearly doubled in scope. I know there was talk of walking around your ship and getting into your hangar and so forth, but if you're going to have planetary fights as well that is going to require a lot of environmental and technical work.

Something to be said for defining a scope and sticking to it.


  

Offline Dragon

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Actually, once you have the "walking around your ship" part done, I would suspect that a full FPS expansion would be more a matter of adding assets. Remember that this component was supposed to be part of the game from the start. Star Citizen's scope is enormous, so I'd guess a lot of it would have to be highly modular, with a powerful scripting system capable of handling multitude of situations. If the weapons code can be used to handle character weapons as well as ship based ones and planetary surfaces you fly over are detailed enough not to look bad from first person, then you can have the FPS component with relatively little additional features (basically boils down to enabling characters to have and use weapons). Ultimately, once you can walk around and shoot, what more is there to it? An FPS expansion was at some point even planned for FS2Open, dunno what became of that (probably nobody actually cared enough to do it).

The biggest problem would be getting the AI to work with the FPS component. This can't be carried over from spaceflight and is a very complex problem. Even games like ArmA suffer from AI occasionally being dumb as a brick and not particularly humanlike. Making a game in which people can walk around and shoot each other is a lot easier than making one in which one person can walk around and shoot at AIs (why do you think so many games go multiplayer-only? You need neither AI nor mission writing). I'd fully expect the FPS component to be multiplayer-only for a long time.

I believe that Roberts can pull this off if he plays this smart. He has money and a huge fanbase. Some of the fans can make good developers (or even already be good developers), while being passionate and unlikely to just get bored and quit. He can afford a large team. "Early Access"-style releases also seem to help keep the devs interested. If it doesn't get abandoned (unlikely, from what I've seen) or doomed by bad management (a real danger that killed many large projects), I think it can succeed. Development will likely take ages, though.

 
Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Actually, once you have the "walking around your ship" part done, I would suspect that a full FPS expansion would be more a matter of adding assets. Remember that this component was supposed to be part of the game from the start. Star Citizen's scope is enormous, so I'd guess a lot of it would have to be highly modular, with a powerful scripting system capable of handling multitude of situations. If the weapons code can be used to handle character weapons as well as ship based ones and planetary surfaces you fly over are detailed enough not to look bad from first person, then you can have the FPS component with relatively little additional features (basically boils down to enabling characters to have and use weapons). Ultimately, once you can walk around and shoot, what more is there to it? An FPS expansion was at some point even planned for FS2Open, dunno what became of that (probably nobody actually cared enough to do it).

Um, two things.

I would think there would be a world of difference in terms of assets and fidelity for a planet which you can fly over and a planet which you can walk upon.  Further are there weather effects? Different gravity types? Destructable terrain? Is the terrain procedural? Are the structures? What about fluids? If they're using an engine that will account for some of that, but I mean the biggest thing is that you're increasing a planet's LOD by 2-3 levels (in freespace terms).

For the FPS aspect. I'm not a game dev but I would suspect there's a heck of lot more going into an FPS than simply walking and shooting.  The gunplay differences between say Halo, COD and Battlefield are immense and are players going to want to play a bare bones FPS compared to one of these dedicated games?  What about hit detection? Latency? Is there bullet penetration? Is there zero-g corridor combat and if so how does the player manoeuvre in the environment?

And what about progression? Having FPS and Starship combat essentially creates two progression trees for ships and equipment. How to balance all of that out and make it interesting and engaging? How to balance ship purchases vs personal combat purchases? A starship should be more expensive than a kit of the best personal equipment.

By comparison look at Halo 4, a big budget AAA microsoft-backed shooter which was a dedicated FPS with a tacked on starship section. Great shooter but fairly mediocre starship combat. If a game this big can achieve only as much as that, how can a brand new indie studio achieve so much more?

Yes it's possible that the game can be finished if Roberts learned enough management from the previous set of games.   Specifically if his apparently bad management and over ambition is outweighed by the available money. Though personally I find the blatant whale hunting to be rather disreputable.  Asking players to pay 2700 USD for a fleet pack is as worse as any free to play garbage and makes some EA's previous transgressions look saintly.  And if they're hunting for whale players before the game is even out it casts a pretty poor light on the spirit  of the game to come in my opinion.

And then on the side there's also the danger that games like No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous could introduce gameplay that Roberts feels must be put into Star Citizen, thereby expanding the scope even further. 

 

Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Actually, once you have the "walking around your ship" part done, I would suspect that a full FPS expansion would be more a matter of adding assets.

This is not an insignificant obstacle. Witness the fact EVE Online was unable to overcome it.
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Offline The E

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
And then on the side there's also the danger that games like No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous could introduce gameplay that Roberts feels must be put into Star Citizen, thereby expanding the scope even further. 

This is already happening, to an extent. Elite's next update, Horizons, will introduce a character creator, planetside gameplay and multicrew ships. Neither of which is as ambitious as what SC is planning (there doesn't seem to be anything even remotely resembling FPS gameplay in there, for example), but unlike CIG, Frontier has a working base game and a design team that has an idea of what they're doing.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Yeah it looks like the ED team is being a lot more intelligent on their managing the developing of their game.

It must suck to slowly watch your dream game being done by every other developer than yourself, while you got the biggest paycheck and everyone paying attention to you.

 

Offline TrashMan

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
The last game CR released was Starlancer, and it was not a good game.

It was a good game.


Quote
On the other hand, Starlancer wasn't half bad, it was all bad .  The AI was beyond ****, the missions were typical CR fare (ie bad), and the story managed to be more trite and cliched than Wing Commander's (without having Wing Commander's decent cast of characters).  I do not understand how anyone can defend it.

you have poor judgment.

The gameplay was fine, the graphics were nice, the atmosphere was there.
The story was nothing to write home about, but so few are.
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Offline Falcon

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
Have to wonder if crowd funding existed in 90's it would have been the same thing with Freelancer.

 

Offline Scotty

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Re: Derek Smart might be taking legal action over Star Citizen
The last game CR released was Starlancer, and it was not a good game.

It was a good game.


Quote
On the other hand, Starlancer wasn't half bad, it was all bad .  The AI was beyond ****, the missions were typical CR fare (ie bad), and the story managed to be more trite and cliched than Wing Commander's (without having Wing Commander's decent cast of characters).  I do not understand how anyone can defend it.

you have poor judgment.

The gameplay was fine, the graphics were nice, the atmosphere was there.
The story was nothing to write home about, but so few are.

Posts like this make me wish it wasn't an abuse of moderator power to warn people for having poor taste and wrong opinions.