Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Faith_sl said:

Any major patch to popular MMOs? TESO content patch for example. MWOs Community Warfare, SWTORS housing and guildships...

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Tuco's 100% on point with this. Patches on existing games are a very different beast than delaying a game release -- especially if the reason for the patch is to fix issues or to add content to a game already gone extremely stale. Most folks here are hyper critical of games releasing too soon, but not of them taking the time to actually make it better before rolling out to the mouth-breathing masses.

@treesong: I somewhat disagree with the "realism' features. I like them in their current form and there should be some lag between switching ships -- which is pretty much all this walking represents right now. That said, I sure as shit don't want to see ToR's 5 minute run through an empty 'filler' hanger every time I land somewhere either, so hopefully they make the immersion parts have some meaning.

I'm going to check this out tonight since I'm able to do the alpha crap or whatever. Had I known this game was going to turn into the biggest money grab of this century I probably wouldn't have donated in retrospect. At the time I was under the "huh, well I'll throw a few bucks towards a chance at another WC. This has turned into something completely different now. This is another one of those things that's making games head down the wrong direction. It's clear from this now we see more unfinished games than complete ones which we can buy into the alpha now.

Tuco_sl said:

Patches for released games are different than delays to released games.

I think people would have cheered if they delayed ESO by six months.

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Ok, I see your point. Lets skip patches and compare 7 months delay of Arena Commander getting a pass while Watch Dogs got flamed for the delay? TESO console release (even thou, as you point out, this has shown itself to not be a bad thing....)? You can not honestly say there are no double standards.

I am pretty pleased with this after playing it. After watching Elite on Twitch, I guess I feel like the following. ED is pretty well, elite, since you spawn and take off from a base all without cut scenes and loading. SC has loading screens and I'm not sure if that's going to last forever but it's certainly a negative vs ED. The actually fighting is pretty close to how I remember things as a kid. The UI needs to be improved quite a bit, but it's only alpha so this isn't a huge deal. I think SC certainly has a good chance to be a great game. I've probably got more faith that they can make this truely great than I've really ever had about any MMOs as of late. The real question is how it will play as a MMO when you need to travel the universe and not just load a dogfighter sim. So that's really my main concern. The game would be trash if we have a universe map where we just click and load little cubes (zones) to do combat. I guess what I'm describing is where in Eve take one system as a example. It was very expansive and even though it was mostly nothing but a few present way points, you get the idea of how infinite and huge in scale it truely is if you slowboat or warp around. In SC it seems like because of the engine we'll get little cubes of gameplay where if we go to far out we hit a wall and explode. This ultimately makes the areas feel very small, and not very space like. It takes you out of the illusion that you are indeed flying in space. Hopefully this engine area limits thing is simply done for the alpha and will change later.

Still not sure why people are thinking this is going to be a massive open world MMO.

Faith_sl said:

Ok, I see your point. Lets skip patches and compare 7 months delay of Arena Commander getting a pass while Watch Dogs got flamed for the delay? TESO console release (even thou, as you point out, this has shown itself to not be a bad thing....)? You can not honestly say there are no double standards.

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There was a lot of bitching about Watch Dogs delay? I thought that thread just devolved into Sean bashing for 5 pages and then the game came out. As to TESO, I can't comment. I did not follow that one at all since I determined in pretty early beta that the turd was strong with it.

forge_sl said:

I'm going to check this out tonight since I'm able to do the alpha crap or whatever. Had I known this game was going to turn into the biggest money grab of this century I probably wouldn't have donated in retrospect. At the time I was under the "huh, well I'll throw a few bucks towards a chance at another WC. This has turned into something completely different now. This is another one of those things that's making games head down the wrong direction. It's clear from this now we see more unfinished games than complete ones which we can buy into the alpha now.

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If you got all the star systems, landing points, ships, economic systems, and customization that they are advertising would the money put in be justified? Or is it impossible at this point to deliver something worthy of the money put in?

Zodiac_sl said:

Still not sure why people are thinking this is going to be a massive open world MMO.

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Because the best part about unfinished MMOs is that you get to fill in the blanks with your imagination

Emotiv_sl said:

Because the best part about unfinished MMOs is that you get to fill in the blanks with your imagination

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We do already know that it will be star systems linked by warp points, and that you will be flying around in your own instanced bubble, and if you have your pvp slider turned off you won't run in to players ever as long as you stay out of the unsafe zones where you can't have pvp off.

I am hoping that Star Citizen isn't turning out to be an overly ambitious project for them. The game would be fun.

But if all we get is Elite, Elite will be good.

I just wanna pewpew Kilrathi.

yea, that was one of my reservations about SC, I doubt they will recapture the desperation of a superior force bearing down on you, or the character of a bunch of bushido thundercats stabbing people with their claws and being able to shit talk them with cat jokes.

I still don't understand why anyone is even talking about delays, I mean were sitting in the middle of the development period where on any other MMo we would hear basically nothing, or maybe get lore for a class if that, and we have playable modules. We have more at this stage than any game I remember ever releasing, doesn't matter if the bits are dog shit and covered in bugs, were at the point where you could tell them to change and they actually could, not to mention that by releasing parts in this way we can directly see how clean the final product is going to be based on how stable and bug free they manage to get these modules as time goes on.

Carl_sl said:

If you got all the star systems, landing points, ships, economic systems, and customization that they are advertising would the money put in be justified? Or is it impossible at this point to deliver something worthy of the money put in?

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At this point I don't even know what I'm getting. I think after they raised 5m? in the original I stopped paying attention. Then a few months later I saw they turned it into buy pixels online.

forge_sl said:

At this point I don't even know what I'm getting. I think after they raised 5m? in the original I stopped paying attention. Then a few months later I saw they turned it into buy pixels online.

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Same I bought a ship over a year ago thinking, cool looks fun. Now they have promised and raised so much I feel the game will be in a never ending state of development. And not the good kind where you are waiting on the new cool patch. The Gmail beta kind, where it will be in "beta" forever and while parts of it will work, anything that doesn't work gets the "its still not finished" speech.

Tuco_sl said:

I've used gmail since it was open to the public but yeah I agree. I'm getting a little unenthused with extended pre-release games. Path of Exile is a good example. By the time it released the community had been playing it so long you felt like you were joining an already stagnate game. There's something unique about playing a game when it releases and exploring fresh content with the rest of the community. When you release a playable alpha and then dole out each new feature piecemeal you lose some of this. You also cause the player to choose between playing the game when it's finished and old or signing up to play it a little at a time over a period of 1+ years.

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I agree here Tuco. I'm in the camp where I want a game to be released with a huge rush of this is blissful and new. Where you still need to figure everything out. Not the PoE method and pretty much everything else which seems to be turning into the norm. Places like SOE doing this for landmark is a huge turn off that a company tries to pawn off their alpha bs for money to play now. It's like BSG quote "this is the shape of things to come". Specially for MMOs where there is probably a 90% failure rate within reason of expectation. Piecemeal is the new golden standard.

forge_sl said:

I agree here Tuco. I'm in the camp where I want a game to be released with a huge rush of this is blissful and new. Where you still need to figure everything out. Not the PoE method and pretty much everything else which seems to be turning into the norm. Places like SOE doing this for landmark is a huge turn off that a company tries to pawn off their alpha bs for money to play now. It's like BSG quote "this is the shape of things to come". Specially for MMOs where there is probably a 90% failure rate within reason of expectation. Piecemeal is the new golden standard.

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I blame minecraft, which is a perfect example of a game never finished.