It does seem like an awful lot to promise. They can't just deliver on half of it, doing it this way. They have to deliver on most of it.
I hope so man. I really do hope so. But battlecruiser 3000AD.
I remember reading about that a while before EQ came out and I was all like, "way? No way!" Turns out, yeah, no way.
It would please me to be wrong.
Oh this will be long. For those reading and not wanting to read a wall of text skip to my very last paragraph which best sums up the whole affair.
Can we agree there were two kinds of promises made?
The Pledge Goals: which at this point vary between Wave 4 ships not expected until 2016 right before launch and a Space Plant. Hell CIG actually asked us if we wanted to keep the goals going in an official poll as they felt it was enough. We voted yes.
There hasn't been a game mechanic as a pledge goal since $41 million (I checked and it was in January of this year) which was the Procedural Generation R&D (Used for the expanded Economic Model and Exploration both in space and planetside to quickly build worlds). Everything else has been stuff (mostly items) you would get in game or the occasional website change/update poll. Hell I'm not sure this one even counts but it's close enough I guess. The pledges leading up to it were for adding more star systems and the Wave 3 ships all the way to $29 million where the goal was added design for Squadron 42.
Dynamic Economic Model, FPS, multi-crew ships, multiplayer EVA (including ship boarding) etc were not part of the original game design and were all added to the to-do list prior to even hitting $27 million which was the original goal of the entire project. So this whole narrative that they are constantly tacking on features is largely a bad joke.
The only real exception to that is Planetside Exploration which wasn't even a thing until a major poll conducted on the site earlier this year. No promise was made to actually deliver it for launch but CR would like to see a light variation of it if he can fit it in. It might not make it but if they can they will try and if not it will be added first shortly after launch. So that's it. That one feature is the seemingly unending flow of added designs to the game.
Ok so that's the Pledge Goals. I hope we can agree now that it's a bullshit argument from gaming mags and alarmist Goons on the forums further spread by misinformed people at no fault of their own.
Now here comes the other side of the coin. This is where you guys watching 10FTC and RtV cringing at Chris and some other Dev saying hey that's a great idea we will look into putting that into the game...
Game Design: I'm not going to explain it but I will simply mention that things like PU mission design, world creation and even AI is all in either early concept phase with miniature versions for testing with very few tangible things Devs can play with (their first true AI v1.0 for an NPC was only created a month ago along with the first few star systems for the Economic Model) or still in R&D (Instancing, seamless space > planet transition, Interspace and Jump Points) or even initial design phase on paper (PU mission logic).
So when you see the devs getting excited about a great idea to incorporate into the game keep in mind that they are referring to things they haven't implemented. They might have a variation on it which is more basic but it's probably in concept. If they ignored the players we wouldn't have a character model which is accurate both in 1st and 3rd person and they would have to either fix it later post launch, fake it like most games do with invisible hit boxes, not do one at all since there wouldn't be an FPS Module if it was up to many people.
Anyway it's the right time to ask them to do something differently since it's early enough to change. Asking them two years ago would have been great too but where was everyone then? Asking them two years from now to go fix the PU mission system because it's too boring is exactly as bad as it sounds. They are obviously more responsive than CCP so it might not take them 10 fucking years to bother to re-vamp the mission system only to barely touch it and claim it's done, why would anyone ever be upset about that I wonder, so CIG might go and fix it to people's liking or may never fix it because there is no perfect solution without spending ridiculous sums of money... or people can suggest a game design change and see if it makes sense to them and see if they can incorporate it. If it makes sense and doesn't adversely impact the game release they might do it or they might delay the game specifically for that.
A great example is Squadron 42. Now that they are half way through building out the first 10 missions they are finding that it will take the player five to ten more hours to complete it. It was originally supposed to be roughly 1 hour per mission. Now it's between 1.5-2 hours per mission. This pushed Episode I of SQ42 back nearly six months in the schedule. If it was Bioware EA would have told them to re-do the entire script and cut it in half or only release the first half and release the second half as a brand new game. SQ42's team had a massive increase in staff to help with the production and try to get it back on track but it looks like even with increase of close to 50% more staff they are still short and are still hiring.
The reason why you or anyone else can't see any other game in the industry being made this way is because none are. They have very strict budgets with very specific goals and you get what you pay for. Case in point Dragon Age 2 with an 18 month development time. Some enjoy it and some thing it's an abortion. Everyone bitches one way or another. Dragon Age:O spent at least 6 years in development. One was a well oiled team given the short end of the stick and still managed to create a working, albeit not great, game and the other had to build a team from the ground up and create everything from scratch. Yeah it took them six years.
Star Citizen has been in development for approximately 3 years with 2 years of actual development and one year of pre-dev planning, world/story creation etc with like 3-5 people besides CR. The first year of their development was with sub 100 employees with the first half of the year with about half that. With nearly 300 employees now one of the lead devs commented a few weeks back that they are understaffed and are still hiring.
Now you can make a valid argument about how he promised X and wants to deliver Y and should have delivered X by now or soon. That's fine and I even agree with it on some level. However compared to any other game in development I have to say this is bullshit and point out that it's an unfair comparison since most games with half of the scope take 4-8 years to make from the ground up and what do we get? All we get is bitching about how the major studios are selling out gamers by not listening to them, ignoring past mistakes and shitting out games for the sake of the shareholders and not the gamers.
If CR had stuck to his original game design plan and never added any pledge goals a different set of people would be commenting here about how it didn't take any game design risks, how uninspired the entire game design was since it was done before in past WC and Privateer games and how he cashed in on his past glory, how much of a rip off of WC the game was and how everyone should avoid it like the plague. That would be right up UT's alley and I would be here commenting how he made a valid argument but still enjoyed the game further pissing him off.
