[Turambar]

He reads like a typical hyper-negative forum troll, picking apart each thing for more to hate.  If he did it on the SC forums, he'd get traction if he was polite, or would get banned for being toxic.

This is absolutely hilarious to me as someone who actually watched Aesaar's journey from being optimistic and defensive about Star Citizen to being as scathing as he is now, spurred on largely by the dismal failure of Arena Commander to present any kind of interesting gameplay.

It's also hilarious when I myself started out mildly sceptical of SC and actively hostile to Elite: Dangerous only to have that perception completely turned around by Frontier's ability to deliver an engaging space combat simulator. And don't give me any fanboy excuses about 'scope', E:D has vastly more completed content.

I am playing Elite, and I know how far the game has come since launch and it's really impressive.  I come across people who havent played in months and complain about things that havent been issues for a while, and they sound like Aesaar.

[Aesaar]

The criticisms Aesaar brings up are basic problems that any successful game should easily overcome. That they haven't been, and that the standard response to anyone who asks about them is to deflect or attack, is a very troubling sign in itself.

it sounds to me like he doesnt know **** about how games actually get developed, and what little he does know doesn't apply to a crowdfunded project of unprecedented scope.

He reads like a typical hyper-negative forum troll, picking apart each thing for more to hate.  If he did it on the SC forums, he'd get traction if he was polite, or would get banned for being toxic.

No, I'd get banned because dissent gets banned on RSI.  But I'm glad you're here to tell us how looking at how other games in SC's genre were developed is invalid because SC is speshul.   Clearly, the only person who knows how to make games is Christ Roberts.  That's why CIG have missed all of their deadlines.  The scope of the game has changed massively since, er, last year.



But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've obviously been spending a lot of time on RSI.

[Phantom Hoover]

I mean, this is how game development works. It's Freelancer all over again, with no publisher to kick CR off the project so it can be released.

[Turambar]

But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've clearly been spending a lot of time on RSI.

Implying that deadlines are relevant to game development

[Phantom Hoover]

being finished is generally considered an important feature of a game

[AtomicClucker]

But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've clearly been spending a lot of time on RSI.

Implying that deadlines are relevant to game development

Depends. Publishers crush studios who repeatedly fail deadlines, while others realize that giving a "specific" deadline is a bad ideas because they shift due to a myriad of circumstances,. But I think we're not above holding Star Citizen to scrutiny. Perhaps they would've just benefited and straight up said "We're making an AAA level of game, five years is at least to be expected."

[Aesaar]

But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've clearly been spending a lot of time on RSI.

Implying that deadlines are relevant to game development

Deadlines are important to every project.  If a team consistently fails to meet deadlines set by that team's leader, it shows a serious issue with management, either because he/she overestimates their team's abilities or underestimates the work required (or in Roberts' case, changes his mind about features all the time).  The people handling the actual technical side of things at CIG are very, very talented.  CIG management is incompetent.  If it were not, they wouldn't have missed all their deadlines.

You can't point to increasing scope as the cause of this.  That image I posted up there was shown at CitCon last year (or later, can't remember).  The only item on that list they've delivered is the Social module, a glorified Mass Effect landing zone but with multiplayer and nothing to actually do.

[The E]

Consider this: From that timeline, the only thing that was even remotely near schedule was the "planetside" thing. And what was it again? A single map, not even a particularly large one, mostly empty and technically unimpressive, very much a generic brown-grey sci fi city map that looked a lot like the Vancouver multiplayer maps from Mass Effect 3. Oh, and there was a chat client in there.

Sure, those are all building blocks that are needed. But a grand revolution in spacesim or MMO gameplay it wasn't. Just like the hangar, it's a showcase for the modeller's skills and nowhere near anything resembling a game.

And that was all they could produce, three years after the start of principal development, with 300 people and 90 million USD in the bank. Other game studios have produced full games with less money and less time. Yes, I know SC has got a larger scope than most MMOs. but in the same timeframe, Elite went from kickstarter to released game, with a steady stream of content updates that make the game deeper. Compared to its peers in the MMO Space Sim genre, SC shows sluggish development, a weird approach to communicating the state of the project, a community eager to throw money at the promise of a jpg, and a thoroughly unpleasant approach to criticisms on its own site or associated communities like the SC reddit.

[Ghostavo]

But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've clearly been spending a lot of time on RSI.

Implying that deadlines are relevant to game development

When the money eventually runs out due to deadlines being missed, I wonder how their cult followers backers will react.

[Lorric]

But insinuating that holding CIG accountable for their schedule slips and broken promises means you just don't know how game development works is a neat idea.  You've clearly been spending a lot of time on RSI.

Implying that deadlines are relevant to game development

When the money eventually runs out due to deadlines being missed, I wonder how their cult followers backers will react.

That's something I'm worried about actually. I think it could do some real damage to some of these people.

[666maslo666]

Missed deadlines are not a big deal in game development, especially if the game has large scope and also attempts to do something new. It happens often. Nobody will care about missed deadlines after the game is released and is good, anyway.

It may realistically take 5 years to develop a big game like SC.

2012 + 5 = 2017

As for Elite, it has much less content than Star Citizen is supposed to have. You cannot leave your seat. It is not a bad game, but it is pretty shallow. I expect much more from SC. So its no surprise that Elite is already released, when it was much simpler to make. You are comparing apples and oranges. And dont even get me started on their weird fly model, Arena Commander in its unfinished state is already superior to that mess, IMHO..

[The E]

As for Elite, it has much less content than Star Citizen is supposed to have. You cannot leave your seat. It is not a bad game, but it is pretty shallow. I expect much more from SC. So its no surprise that Elite is already released, when it was much simpler to make. You are comparing apples and oranges. And dont even get me started on their weird fly model, Arena Commander in its unfinished state is already superior to that mess, IMHO..

Correction: You cannot do so now. You will be able to as part of the Horizon upgrades, incoming over the next year. See, the thing is, while SC is trying to come out of the gate with every single thing in place, Frontier concentrated on getting the core of the game done and are now expanding it. This model seems to work out much better than CIG's "Let's hire a bunch of studios to work on pieces of the game in isolation and hope we can merge it into a coherent whole at some point" approach.

And as for the flight model, while that's ultimately a matter of personal preference, I think for all the comparisons between SC and Diaspora we're making in this regard, Elite actually managed to create a flight model that is more responsive and intuitive than both.

Not to mention that playing Elite actually feels much better due to it being very scalable indeed, as opposed to the unoptimized mess that seems to be Arena Commander.

[Sushi]

Correction: You cannot do so now. You will be able to as part of the Horizon upgrades, incoming over the next year.

Well, sort of. You get a fade-to-black transition to a different seat. I think "space legs" and being able to walk around properly won't be coming until 2017 at the earliest.

And as for the flight model, while that's ultimately a matter of personal preference, I think for all the comparisons between SC and Diaspora we're making in this regard, Elite actually managed to create a flight model that is more responsive and intuitive than both.

All three have the same basic constraint of "we like 6DOF newtonian physics but want flying to actually be fun", and choose slightly different ways of breaking physics to achieve that result.

[Aesaar]

Missed deadlines are not a big deal in game development, especially if the game has large scope and also attempts to do something new. It happens often. Nobody will care about missed deadlines after the game is released and is good, anyway.

Again, one or two missed deadlines is no big deal.  Every deadline being missed is a big deal because it says very bad things about how competent management is.  Sure, no one would care about missed deadlines if the game was good, but if the management is incompetent, the game isn't terribly likely to be good.

[Luis Dias]

So here's a horrible hitjob on Star Citizen's cockpit.

First, a clear screenshot of it:



A 1920 x 1080 basic screenshot of PURE IMMERSIVENESS. That means a whole 2 073 600 pixels.

Now, let's all count the number of pixels that are 100% opaque to the actual beautiful things on the universe, and the incredible IMMERSIVE overlays that will let you know everything you want to know about this very very immersive breathable game.



Now, the real opaque stuff counts to ~ 919 150 pixels. That's 44% of the entire screen of immersive junk on your face.
The overlays will count to ~ 243 000 pixels, slightly less than 12%.

So, for all those keeping score, that's 56% of the screen encumbered by something, most of which utterly opaque, leaving merely 44% of the screen estate to try to understand what the **** is going on. And these 44% are all fragmented. There's this small opening up in the top that is absolutely useless, and then there are these front-left and front-right awareness windows that are hard to pin down whatever the **** is going on there.

The one window where you'd think it would be the most important one to figure the **** out what the hell is going on has a STAGGERING 175 000 pixels. Which amounts to 8.5% of the total. Eight. Point. Five.

Funny stat: Even in 1998, running Freespace 2 at 640x480 (I mean, who would burn their eyes at that, but still!), you'd still be left with 307 200 pixels (Most of which with overlays, BUT STILL).

[Lorric]

It's very bad. It ceases to be a problem if cockpits are optional. I don't know if they will be or not. It feels claustrophobic. And having that box around the centre is going to make it harder to line things up properly and cause irritation.

This is the far future, we should be able to have entirely enclosed cockpits but the technology makes it so you can see everything as if you were looking through clear glass.

Desire to actually play this if released would take a big hit for me if I was forced to have that cockpit on screen.

[Spoon]

It ceases to be a problem if cockpits are optional. I don't know if they will be or not.

They won't be. You'll be forced into all this immersion.

[SkycladGuardian]

Hehe, this reminds me of the "good ol' " days of space sims in the early and mid 90's where cockpits vhelped to visualize the ship class you're flying. Interceptors and space superioriy fighters had good vision with few cockpit elements cluttering up the main view (like the A-Wing or Arrow in WC3) and heavy fighters and bombers had bulky cockpits and the view was very encumbered (e.g. Y-Wing, TIE Bomber, Longbow or Broadsword).

Chris Roberts just wants you to feel the spirit of his retro-style next-gen space sim

[Akalabeth Angel]

The criticisms Aesaar brings up are basic problems that any successful game should easily overcome. That they haven't been, and that the standard response to anyone who asks about them is to deflect or attack, is a very troubling sign in itself.

it sounds to me like he doesnt know **** about how games actually get developed, and what little he does know doesn't apply to a crowdfunded project of unprecedented scope.

What's proper game development I wonder?
Is it gray boxing a game and getting the basic components and gameplay down before applying the finishing touches?
Or is it creating an okay game with very detailed models and then starting and finishing other very detailed models in turn later on while the gameplay still remains "okay" and unfinished.

I wonder if for the new Doom did Bethesda/iD finish the Imp before bothering to start the Cyber Demon?  Or did they get all enemies at some stage of completion so that they could be put into the game and the level designers could star their work while the modellers, animators and FX guys were finishing theirs.

Star Citizen's development comes across to me as the way a team of amateurs would MOD a game. And in fact some of the teams on HLP are probably doing a better job with their pipelines.

[Akalabeth Angel]

It's very bad. It ceases to be a problem if cockpits are optional. I don't know if they will be or not. It feels claustrophobic. And having that box around the centre is going to make it harder to line things up properly and cause irritation.

This is the far future, we should be able to have entirely enclosed cockpits but the technology makes it so you can see everything as if you were looking through clear glass.

Desire to actually play this if released would take a big hit for me if I was forced to have that cockpit on screen.

Could be worse:
https://youtu.be/oR1MnjqTlXY?t=50s