Chris Roberts calls bullshit on the Star Citizen feature creep police - Polidicks

[QUOTE=Zephyrs;48258343]I see all this praise for this game, and honestly, the only thing going through my mind every time I read about it is how glad I am I didn't even buy into the hype. I don't care what the devs say, everything I read about it is pointless feature bloat and game modes. It's going to be yet another enormous generic do everything, yet do nothing interesting game. The only interesting part seems to be the game engine.[/QUOTE] Those features and game modes are features and rulesets that will be implemented into the final version of the persistent world. Hardly a waste.

Am i the only one that doesn't know what kinda game this is? :v:

[QUOTE=Giraffen93;48258574]Am i the only one that doesn't know what kinda game this is? :v:[/QUOTE] I still haven't figured out if it eventually gonna have EVE like persistent MMO scale multiplayer or not.

[QUOTE=Giraffen93;48258574]Am i the only one that doesn't know what kinda game this is? :v:[/QUOTE] It's a spacefaring game that is separated into a few modules, one of them being a first person shooter

[QUOTE=Giraffen93;48258574]Am i the only one that doesn't know what kinda game this is? :v:[/QUOTE] It's a sandbox similar to Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies and EVE (more like the latter since it's sci-fi) so you're dropped into a universe and you can do what you want. Rather than it being about what content is given to you, the developers give you a set of mechanics to make the player interaction the content. A more sustainable model in my honest opinion considering you don't see people drop out and wait for the next patch of raids/instances or whatever. There's space so you can be a space pirate and first person/planetside combat so you can go for planetary/station control on the ground. Personally I'm going to be a bounty hunter like I am in The Repopulation/Star Wars Galaxies.

[QUOTE=DJswitch;48258586]It's a spacefaring game that is separated into a few modules, one of them being a first person shooter[/QUOTE] Well, at the moment, it is/will be, but in the not-too-distant future, the modules will all blend into a single experience. When you log in, you will be in first-person mode, and you'll stay that way as you get into a ship, fly out of your hangar into space (for the next while this will likely be a semi-interactive loading cutscene to disguise the loading transition, but eventually it's to be seamless), and get into trouble or whatever you get up to in space. Attacking and boarding a ship and having gunfights in the hallways will happen seamlessly without loading screens. The local physics grid tech is online internally right now, and the devs are preparing a multicrew ship demo for Gamescom (August 7th) that will rely on local physics grids for being able to get up and walk around in ships in flight, and they intend on having it available to test soon after...soooo expect anywhere between mid-September and end of October, I'm not even gonna try and sugarcoat it, but I'll be surprised and delighted if it's live sooner.

I find it hard to get upset over "feature creep" when 90% of games have features either unfinished or removed (sometimes for DLC).

[QUOTE=Explosions;48259345]I find it hard to get upset over "feature creep" when 90% of games have features either unfinished or removed (sometimes for DLC).[/QUOTE] Also this. I'd take feature creep over buying less than half the game at launch so I can pay $60 in launch-day DLC any day.

Also, for people wondering what Star Citizen is, here is a trailer that the devs prepared for SXSW this year. [hd]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbZLbb0_RBI[/hd] All footage was captured live in-engine with production assets; all of the planetside and fps gameplay elements shown (minus buying ships in the dealership, and manually taking off from planets) should be publicly available to players by the end of the year, barring more major delays to make sure things are done right. The dogfighting footage was presumably taken from the live public builds.

[QUOTE=Explosions;48259345]I find it hard to get upset over "feature creep" when 90% of games have features either unfinished or removed (sometimes for DLC).[/QUOTE] You know feature creep is a pretty common reason why games wind up unfinished on release or have to be split up into DLC to recoup investment, right? Granted that's usually because they're beholden to publishers, but as much as they've crowdfunded, Cloud Imperium's budget is not unlimited. They're still a long ways off from a viable release and I have my doubts that they'll be able to complete everything that was promised.

[QUOTE=catbarf;48259438]You know feature creep is a pretty common reason why games wind up unfinished on release or have to be split up into DLC to recoup investment, right? Granted that's usually because they're beholden to publishers, but as much as they've crowdfunded, Cloud Imperium's budget is not unlimited. They're still a long ways off from a viable release and I have my doubts that they'll be able to complete everything that was promised.[/QUOTE] They will, they may not have an infinite budget, but they have an infinite time. Ideally, they'll be shipping stuff by modules.

[QUOTE=catbarf;48259438]You know feature creep is a pretty common reason why games wind up unfinished on release or have to be split up into DLC to recoup investment, right? Granted that's usually because they're beholden to publishers, but as much as they've crowdfunded, Cloud Imperium's budget is not unlimited. They're still a long ways off from a viable release and I have my doubts that they'll be able to complete everything that was promised.[/QUOTE] They stopped adding stretch goals at the $65mil mark, $20 million ago; they expect to exceed $100 million in crowdfunding when the dust has cleared, and if they really were desperate they could be a [I]little[/I] slimy for the sake of padding the runway out just that extra bit necessary and get away with it -- not that I'm encouraging such a thing, but if it was pull the plug on everything and die at the 95% mark or sell ships for a year after launch despite promises otherwise, I'd rather the game live. A number of major efforts are coming online now and in the realistically-achievable future that fill in a bunch of the gaps in Star Citizen's foundation. These are: - Large Worlds, the conversion of Cryengine to 64bit double float precision that means the playable map increases from ~20km cubed to millions of kilometers, is online, and while the patch currently on the test server (1.1.5) does not leverage the map size to its full capabilities yet (that's coming within probably three months), internal dev builds have achieved at least hundreds of thousands of km wide, and have implemented the initial form of in-system fast travel to deal with the new distances between points - Local physics grids, which enable Cryengine to support arbitrary frames of reference, including rotating frames, and do all the magic of translating coordinates during gameplay; this enables walking around inside a multicrew ship under artificial gravity and keeping in sync with what's going on outside the windows - The fps animation system is a complete overhaul on Cryengine's animation system and unifies first-person and third-person animations as well as makes motion feel more natural by including natural-like corrections and overstep transitions in between motion states (e.g. tilting into a turn on the run, or having an extra little movement when coming to a stop while running) -- this is one of the main blockers holding everything back, because not cheating with first-person animations is hard and is why almost nobody ever does it - The netcode was fucked; the Generic Instance Manager has just come online in the 1.1.5 patch being tested and is the first step into unfucking the netcode and laying the foundation for the MMO networking - Planetside locations (and other interior on-foot locations not on planets) are built from shared sets of building blocks, varying by architecture type; a recently-colonized frontier world will have a different look to a built-up corporate factory world that's been around for a century. Once a building set is created, assembling planetside locations is fairly rapid and is partially procedural due to the modularity of the building sets. Since all of the materials are using PBR technology, tinting the base texture of a prop is as simple as dragging RGB sliders, making variation easy. Three architecture sets have been completed and four more were in the works the last time they were mentioned in a monthly report. While I don't expect 100% of the promises and dreams and hopes of the community to survive first contact with the compiler, I'm confident that enough will make it through to be playable within a year or two of post-beta launch that it'll be several steps beyond anything else out there. Anything could change in the future, but with the amount of info the devs provide us, I'm confident that they're not just rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic during these delays.

[QUOTE=Ragekipz;48259572]They will, they may not have an infinite budget, but they have an infinite time. Ideally, they'll be shipping stuff by modules.[/QUOTE] They don't have anything close to infinite time. You think the developers are going to keep working on the game when they're not being paid anymore? Their time is limited directly by their budget, once the money stops flowing the development will stop. That might not be for a long time, and having as many millions in crowd funding as most medium to large games have from publishers does give them more time to dole out the money carefully, but it doesn't give them unlimited time. Eventually they have to clamp down the things they need and leave unfinished stuff for later, or they're going to run out of money.

[QUOTE=Ragekipz;48259572]but they have an infinite time.[/QUOTE] If rent, electricity, hardware, licensing, outreach, and publishing were all free, and the developers didn't expect a paycheck, sure- and that kind of thing can work out for amateur productions where people contribute as a hobby. But this is a AAA title, so budget and time are one and the same. [QUOTE=elixwhitetail;48259681]While I don't expect 100% of the promises and dreams and hopes of the community to survive first contact with the compiler, I'm confident that enough will make it through to be playable within a year or two of post-beta launch that it'll be several steps beyond anything else out there.[/QUOTE] I don't doubt that the end result is going to be extremely complex and detailed, I worry only that it won't live up to expectations, hype, and promises. Maybe it will work, but the different modules won't work together as seamlessly as predicted (thinking EVE and Dust 514). Maybe it will all work together fine, but in the end provide a shallow MMO experience. Maybe it will work, but technical issues will cause frustrating problems or force unexpected limitations. Really just the basic concerns about any game, but amplified due to the extreme scope and complexity of the project and all its interacting pieces. I don't think the game is going to fail like some expect but I also don't believe such an unprecedented and highly ambitious project is going to deliver 100%, and I am a little concerned about the additions of new features and new elements, delaying the release of an actual core game as opposed to the (admittedly impressive!) tech demos we've gotten so far. And I say this as a huge fan of Chris Roberts' previous work, and someone who backed within a week of the project going live. It's now two and a half years since the project started; I'd really like to just see a core game, even if it only represents a small part of what SC will eventually be, rather than demos of increasingly complex disparate elements with promises of how they'll all work together someday.

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;48259741]They don't have anything close to infinite time. You think the developers are going to keep working on the game when they're not being paid anymore? Their time is limited directly by their budget, once the money stops flowing the development will stop. That might not be for a long time, and having as many millions in crowd funding as most medium to large games have from publishers does give them more time to dole out the money carefully, but it doesn't give them unlimited time. Eventually they have to clamp down the things they need and leave unfinished stuff for later, or they're going to run out of money.[/QUOTE] If their business model works, they can release the game by modules and use the money they make to keep development going. People just need something more concrete.

[QUOTE=CR's letter]Originally we had just planned to share a multiplayer dogfighting alpha and then the beta of the game (which would have just been Squadron 42). As we smashed every stretch goal, and continued to power through additional ones, it was pretty apparent we had to find a way to keep people engaged while we were building this virtual universe. In today’s 24/7 short attention-span world people don’t have the patience to wait around for years. This is why we decided on multiple modules: the Hangar, so you could first see your ships and walk around them in the manner you would in the final game, then Arena Commander, to allow people to get a taste and give feedback on the basic dogfight and flight mechanics. Star Marine, which will be available shortly, is the module for backers to experience and give their feedback on the First Person Shooting component of the game. Not long after that we will be releasing the next level of Arena Commander, allowing players with bigger ships to fly them with friends, on maps that are closer in size to the huge ones you’ll have in the final game. Then we’re rolling out aspects of the Persistent Universe: first there will be just planet side environments to explore, but not long after you’ll be able to transition to space and fly to another destination, and then after that to another system. We have taken this route to allow people to experience and give feedback to make the game better as we build it. Almost no one else does this. And we’re still doing it: case in point, our first 16-player version of Arena Commander went to the PTU on Saturday! I’ve said it countless times: my goal is to make the journey of Star Citizen’s development worth the price of admission and the final game be the best bonus in the world.[/QUOTE] The devs are working hard to make such a thing a reality; while the fps module has been sitting here holding actual public releases back, the AC 2.0 work has been going unabated (local physics grid, large worlds), such that they're already starting to work the tech into public builds in baby steps for early smoke testing for the upcoming multicrew demo in two and a half weeks, and the PU team has been going to town on getting NPC AI working (also needed for Squadron 42) as well as building out more content. Once the planetside module is live, it's a short step to linking landing zones to taking off into space, and once you've connected surface areas to space, all you need is a working version of jump points to connect systems, and now you've got the initial implementation of the PU knit together (and probably buggy as hell tbh). I've no idea when this'll happen, but unless CIG pulls another 6-month delay on us on the social/planetside module as soon as fps drops, I'd expect to reach that planetside-into-PU baby steps moment in, realistically, 9-10 months, perhaps a bit sooner. And things will start to come together before then. The other key is that the devs have been doing a good job, overall, of listening to backers and responding to feedback to refine and iterate on the state of the playable game. Arena Commander 0.8 and 0.9.x are hot dogshit compared to the current state of AC, even with the problems the current builds have. The fps module's being polished to a reasonably high degree, but it still won't be perfect, and they'll be making adjustments for player feedback for a while yet, and they'll continue to do so in Arena Commander. If SC was being developed as a traditional game, which meant that the public didn't get to playtest it until everything was already in code freeze, I'd be a lot more skeptical, but they make sure to get builds into our hands as soon as it makes sense to invite public feedback. I can't blame you for impatience/wanting to see the "whole" prototype together instead of separated chunks. The game has missed all resemblance of the original deadlines, fact. However, and Chris highlights this in his letter, the scope of the game's increased several times over and that has consequences to the development timeline because there's just that extra amount of work to do.

Is it just me or does Chris Roberts kind of look like Elon Musk? and instead of actually shooting for the stars he's just dreaming it

Okay but didnt Star Citizen just like this month or June straight up just drop the entire FPS part of the game because it was too much?

[QUOTE=HoodedSniper;48260964]Okay but didnt Star Citizen just like this month or June straight up just drop the entire FPS part of the game because it was too much?[/QUOTE] No? [editline]21st July 2015[/editline] it got delayed for a few weeks where did you get the idea that they'd spotaniously throw away a major part of the game thats already well developed. hell you could play (but not well) it in that leaked dev build awhile back.

[QUOTE=HoodedSniper;48260964]Okay but didnt Star Citizen just like this month or June straight up just drop the entire FPS part of the game because it was too much?[/QUOTE] Not even close. They've yet to renege on a single one of their promises, actually. Stuff just gets delayed for short amounts of time because of development snags, which are to be expected. Whomever you heard that from is making shit up, and ought not to be trusted.

Well, might just keep playing elite then. Its fun, but feels kinda empty. In other words, need to wait for about two or three more big updates.

[QUOTE=Mattk50;48261319]No? [editline]21st July 2015[/editline] it got delayed for a few weeks where did you get the idea that they'd spotaniously throw away a major part of the game thats already well developed. hell you could play (but not well) it in that leaked dev build awhile back.[/QUOTE] I dont really follow much of the dev, thought I saw some article saying they just scrapped it a few weeks ago. I was pretty shocked because like you said its a major part of the game, and its actually the part im most hyped for.

[QUOTE=HoodedSniper;48261528]I dont really follow much of the dev, thought I saw some article saying they just scrapped it a few weeks ago. I was pretty shocked because like you said its a major part of the game, and its actually the part im most hyped for.[/QUOTE] There was [URL="https://www.polygon.com/2015/6/30/8871167/star-citizens-fps-module-delayed-indefinitely"]some retarded FUD[/URL] about how the fps module was "delayed indefinitely", which is industry PR speak for " canceled ", but the devs stepped right up and said, [URL="https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/5254024/#Comment_5254024"]no, this is not the case[/URL]. [URL="https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/5249689/#Comment_5249689"]They were not ready to commit to a deadline[/URL] that they weren't sure they'd be able to nail to the day (not an easy task when you're doing things that haven't been done before), but that's not the same as " delayed indefinitely ". The gaming "press" has a field day with doomsaying clickbait headlines about SC most of the time (especially Polygon, but they [I]have[/I] written ethically fair articles in the past so they're inconsistent at being terrible) and this case was no exception--PC Gamer said "delayed indefinitely" and the usual suspects jumped on it. They used to give us specific date projections, but there was always the unspoken provision that the patch would be delayed if there were big technical blockers, but then when the deadline passed with no release, due to ordinary development delays, the forum would rip their heads off. After a few of those, they decided to get better at managing expectations, so they don't give specific dates unless they know they'll be able to lock it in. A certain someone who's an attention whore and a fifth-rate developer fanned these flames for his own self-promotion, and is simply untrustworthy in this matter. Chris Roberts has said the fps module is on track for being available to us in probably 3-5 weeks. So, realistically, October, but that's normal for development when you don't have a developer carving release dates into devs' foreheads.

Kinda concerned here, cuz creating big MMO-type games takes time. Money should certainly not be a problem. When compared to WoW, it took anywhere between $60 to $100 million to make in terms of money, and about [I]10 years[/I] in terms of time. These days, games development is probably faster but still, shit takes time.. How long has SC been in development anyway? And how would you compare it on the scale of vanilla WoW? (If this is even a good comparison, WoW and SC.)

[QUOTE=Bat-shit;48277143]Kinda concerned here, cuz creating big MMO-type games takes time. Money should certainly not be a problem. When compared to WoW, it took anywhere between $60 to $100 million to make in terms of money, and about [I]10 years[/I] in terms of time. These days, games development is probably faster but still, shit takes time.. How long has SC been in development anyway? And how would you compare it on the scale of vanilla WoW? (If this is even a good comparison, WoW and SC.)[/QUOTE] Three years. There's not really a good comparison between WoW and SC. It's not a hand-crafted gameworld with tons of hand-built quests, multiple storylines, that sort of thing, so they don't have to spend nearly as much time writing and building story content. With SC, it's very much "build the parts of the world, then put them together," which is going to allow it to release within our lifetimes. So, in terms of actual, physical content, the major features that will support the game, at least two of them are in the final stages of development. Everything to do with flight and dogfighting has been in public testing now for about a year, and everything to do with first-person on-foot movement and combat will be releasing soonish. A couple months or so. And from there, those just get refined and used to test new content like ships, weapons, etc. Hangars have been around forever, at least two years. Those are getting aesthetic revamps, but are otherwise done. So, where does that put things now? There are two major content parts that they need to build: Space and land. Land's still in the design stages, but from what they've shown it's very nearly done. Space might take another two years. All the backend stuff's being worked on by other teams, they're not showing it yet, but don't think nobody's building it. I'd say the game's going to go gold in... two years? Maybe a little more. That's five years of development, which is pretty standard for a AAA title. They're almost halfway done.

[QUOTE=Bat-shit;48277143]Kinda concerned here, cuz creating big MMO-type games takes time. Money should certainly not be a problem. When compared to WoW, it took anywhere between $60 to $100 million to make in terms of money, and about [I]10 years[/I] in terms of time. These days, games development is probably faster but still, shit takes time.. How long has SC been in development anyway? And how would you compare it on the scale of vanilla WoW? (If this is even a good comparison, WoW and SC.)[/QUOTE] You're not accounting for the fact that Blizzard's MMO is content heavy while Star Citizen is aiming to be more like EVE and Galaxies where player interaction is the main focus here. Don't get me wrong, there will be content, it's just not thousands of quests and raids and cinematics and all that kind of stuff. Where do you get the impression that money is a problem? They have at least two more years of funding assuming they don't hire anyone else and they don't make any more money (which isn't happening because every day they're getting more and more as people find out about it and/or existing citizens wanting to upgrade their backing tiers) They'll probably get a large amount of funding when the FPS module comes out, a huge spike when the social planetside module comes out, another huge spike when Squadron comes out and alpha access for the persistent universe. They're going to squeeze another year of funding out of all that alone. Even if the game gets delayed an additional two years which isn't likely, they have the money for it.

No no no, I'm not having the impression that money's a problem. Or (the lack of) countless of RPG-like quests for that matter. I'm just thinking that your average 5 years is probably still not enough for a game of this "magnitude," which is 2 years from now. I think it's safe to say it's not your average AAA title? (Kind of similarly like WoW, but forget WoW otherwise.)

Star Citizen is, in a certain way, multiple AAA-tier titles, as Squadron 42 is intended to be a full-fledged singleplayer AAA title (with two sequels planned, and additional other storylines where you're a pirate or a bounty hunter or something intended in the future once the SQ42 trilogy is out), and then there's the PU, an open-ended player-content-driven MMO environment. However, they're doing things in a modular way to make the scale manageable. Parts are built to be reused, and architectural building sets are made to assemble in various different ways, allowing different designs and visual looks to emerge from the same pieces. (And there are seven architecture sets in the works/already finished, adding to the variety.)