Honestly, switching Engines probably wasnt the smartest thing to do. It may be its saving grace if the game ever releases, and they get better performance and are able to release content faster. But massive changes like that in the production phase just kind of seem.. poorly thought out from the beginning? Every since I saw the move to the new engine, I assumed that they ran into a problem similar to EverQuest Next or Star Wars.
EQ:N would load anything and everything in the direction you're looking, regardless if you can see it or not (caves in the ground for example). They couldnt fix it without a system revamp of some sort. I believe it was because of how Voxels would render, so a system revamp would require them to gut the Voxel system? Feel free to clear that up for me. Star Wars original plan was to have three to five major zones in a cluster that you could warp to. You would be able to seamlessly go from the planet, to the station, to a zone with a space battle. The only loading would be the initial warp into the cluster of zones. Once they saw how shitty the engine was in alpha, they pulled that whole system, scrapped it, and recycled art assets. That engine could barely handle a pvp match of 5 players.
I doubt Ill give Star Citizen much of a chance. Very cool looking game in the moments it shines. But all that stuff between those great moments looks super boring and monotonous. That trailer where you're driving across a barren planet for 5 minutes to kill a handful of bandits doesnt seem very riveting. The large sandworm was a great cap to that clip, but thats when they should have been able to call their ship to do a fly by and roast that ass for the ultimate trailer ending. Shit, even WoW has your ship nuking shit for you from somewhere off in space. Regardless though, I hope the game does release. The piles of money that this studio is spending to figure out certain logistical problems will go a long ways in helping other companies skip past those problems and release a better product.
