Not necessarily. The MMO part of the game can't be made, not with CryEngine, but a limited scope, level based, linear singleplayer SQ42 could be made. It just can't be made with Chris in charge as he's already proven to be the worst project manager in the industry.
Yes. But they would have to start from scratch because the time and money it would take to rip out everything that's not needed for such a game, they could start with UE4. I know a lot about this because I have faced it many times in the past. You take a look at what you have and determine whether or not to continue down a path of great aggro, or strip out stuff you know is either not needed, problematic etc, and go from there.
If someone called me, right now and said "How would you make Star Citizen from this point on?", I would ask for $20M and 2 years. Keep all the content (art, models etc), throw everything else out. Start from scratch with a new engine (UE4 is the best option to build a custom engine from) and build a new Freelancer (Star Citizen + SQ42) but with session based multiplayer. It's how Elite Dangerous came to be so successful. They stuck with a tight vision and plan.
And the reason I say throw everything (engine related) else out is because the amount of time that it would take to rip out all the broken garbage, could be better spent making new components. e.g. multiplayer/networking, flight model, control scheme etc - all suck, are a performance nightmare etc. Think about it; if they didn't add anything else to the game right now, and instead just fixed bugs and complete the in-progress features, do you see a "game" of any kind there?
Decisions like this are the primary reason why I decided not to do a new Universal Combat game even when space games started coming back around the 2012 time frame. I knew that I would have to start from scratch with a new engine, it would take too much time, cost too much money, and was very risky in the current gaming climate. So instead, I took a look at the last version released in 2009, and the fact that even though I had made my money back on it, a LOT of people were interested when I put it on steam in Feb 2015. That game was released back in 2009 (it wasn't on Steam). Though SteamSpy is off, it has sold a little over 300K units on there alone. And the entire series (which first came out in 2004), hasn't even sold 2M units to date. It's a very niche product and category.
Because I knew that I had fans who would still buy it if I kept improving on it, I went the DLC route instead. If you look at the latest version
changelog which I released just yesterday, as well as the Trello
dev board, it's a LOT of under-the-hood updates, along with some improvements. I am not making any attempt to add the latest "kewl thing" because everyone else is doing that. Heck, I didn't even
once consider multiplayer, though the original did have it. At the top level in terms of visual content, it's just a new coat of paint. By the time it's completed (and I'm the only dev working on it, the others are artists/modelers), it would have cost less to make than a whole new game; though I'm not entirely certain that it would have taken less time as a full blown product, seeing as I work on it part-time and in tandem with my other projects (LoD, Alganon).
Heck, I still get hives and sleepless nights over Line Of Defense, my most expensive game. And I had to make that decision almost a year ago to port it to UE4 rather than risk a PC only release, and deal with an engine that was no longer supported on any platform. I just wrote an updated
dev blog earlier this month about that.
I just don't see
any feasible way for them to go anywhere with Star Citizen in its current form. They will of course keep adding broken stuff on top of a broken stuff and spend more time fixing layers of broken stuff than working toward an end goal. They have to do that in order to keep as close to promises as possible. It's why they sell JPEGs, make the ships, throw it in - regardless of functionality or required gameplay features being implemented. And it's precisely why they seemingly don't have a closed game loop - of any kind - over 6 yrs later.
Now it's going to get worse because croberts is $46M (that we
know of) in the hole to third-parties (besides banks) and seeing as they're NOT profitable, money to pay that back has to come from somewhere. That's through cut-backs so that they can stretch backer money, and also through sales of something new. That being SQ42 - which is now probably
two whole years - according to them.
I have to say that it's astonishing to me that they're touting SQ42 as coming to Beta in 18 months (which probably means about 24 months to "completion"), and very few backers blinked. Aside from being a massive five alarm fire
proving me right that they've been lying this whole time. It's even more astonishing that those same backers look at the financial brochures (which as I said in my
A New Dawn blog is just for show) and immediately proclaim that everything is fine! Even though with $14M in the bank YE 2017, they would have collapsed if funding had stopped.
Here's something else worth noting. They knew since May 2018 that they had raised money via third parties. But they kept it quiet, waiting until after the Q4 fundraising events so as not to panic the whales who are still delusional into thinking everything is OK. Then guess what? Between Oct-Dec,
they have raised about $14M. Which is close to the amount of money they had left in reserves back in YE 2017.
Also, though the investment news was made public on 12/12, the official CIG statement didn't come out until 12/20. For that 10 day period, they made almost
double what they made back in 2017 during the same period. Then after the news dropped (by CIG), between 12/20 - 12/30, they have made about $1.5M compared to the $1.6M during the same period in 2017. No, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Nobody knows how exactly this is all going to end, but now that they have shown that they couldn't build a game of any kind with $213M, whatever they release in the form of Star Citizen and/or SQ42, isn't going to be worth the money spent because any seasoned dev studio could have built the original scoped game for about $20M. I personally can't wait for the mental gymnastics which are going to be playing out in 2019 to 2020 when the sheep try to justify how they paid $200M+ for Gold chest, but ended up with a $20M stainless steel box - without a lid. But hey, they've always said they're funding the "dream". We just get to lol.
