The disconnect is only in one place - Chris. Aside from Wing Commander (a game made so long ago it shipped on 5.25" floppy disks) his history is mixed at best. Once he milked the good will out of his original franchise, he ran everything else into the ground. Even Freelancer, his last reasonable foray into gaming, had to be taken from him and released by a real production company. That was in 2000 - 16 years ago.
This is an understandable stance to take if you have never developed video games before. While agreed he produced games 16 years ago those games were very successful when released and seem to be still enjoyed to this day. The Wing Commander Series was an excellent set of games when released. Having been around for when they were released they were some of the best games available to play on the systems at the time. Origin as a whole was producing fantastic games in that era. Game design is like riding a bike, you do not forget how to do it. What Chris may lack in technical understanding he makes up for by hiring people that can fill those voids and get the job done.
Honest question: Have you developed and/or released games? I've seen remarks like that on the forums as well as on the subreddit and most of them don't align with my experience in the industry or that of my peers. I've seen backers telling
actual (anonymous) game developers that they have no clue about game development.
Game design is evolving constantly and the pace has only increased in recent years. While developing a game at least a few competitors will come up with amazing ideas and solutions to design problems you are currently facing and you know that you can't do anything about it and have to ship a game with a less-then-great part of your design. That's "normal", because you need to release a game and can't play "catch-up" all the time (also because you normally don't have unlimited time and/or money - and that's a
good thing™).
It takes 1-2 games to change the landscape and player expectations with it. Look at the rise of MOBAs. Starcraft's not the biggest eSports game around anymore, as MOBAs' razor-sharp focus on team play and your single (!) unit has overtaken it massively. Blizzard was fortunate enough to identify the toxicity and elitism of LoL's player base as something they can exploit with their more "noob"-friendly HOTS (and MOBAs itself are a poster child for the more modern "release early/iterate often" school of game development).
And that's just one example of many. Look at how ridiculous weapon customisation has become in modern military shooters. How action-oriented western RPGs have become. The rise of companion apps or websites.
CR himself noted that he "needs" to release a game by 2014 to avoid it becoming stale. He was right. But then the money came rolling in and for some reason he thought abandoning that plan was a good choice. Now they're playing catch-up.
And let's put down those rose-tinted glasses when it comes to Wing Commander - gameplay-wise that game was ok. It delivered a cinematic experience and combined spaceflight gameplay with a pulp SciFi story. But it (as much as it's successors) was never a joy to play - how they didn't even think about improving that janky, twitchy spaceflight at all boggles my mind.
Since that time Chris has not been in the gaming industry, and has not learned anything during his absence. Now that he's back, he's literally reinventing and rediscovering almost two decades of gaming lessons first hand, not because gaming best practices have failed to evolve, but because he doesn't think any game developers over a near 20 year period have anything to teach him.
That arrogance led him to commit an extraordinary amount of his backer money into lavish offices in 4 countries across the world, filling them with the accumulated bric-a-brac that actual development companies, such as Blizzard, had to earn over decades of hard work and actual produced, shipped, and commercially successful products and IPs. He skipped all that and went straight for the appearance of success. CIG, as an entity, has no games to its name, shipped or otherwise.
CIG needs offices to work, having non-dumpy offices help get work done as employees enjoy working in a nice space. As well, when moving forward and looking to the future all capital expenses around offices only help with optics when it comes to attracting other investors. Would you want to work in a dump? Bric-a-brac will come in from everyone that works there. Game developers are notorious for bringing in man dolls and the like.
Nobody cares about the bric-a-brac that devs bring to the office, but what he's alluding to is the massive amount of stuff that's on display in the offices for a game that isn't even out yet. Calling them out for spending money on that is often construed as expecting them to sit in unheated huts, but that's a
logical fallacy. Of course they need decent offices, but what CIG does ($20k coffee machines or not) veers into "lavish office" territory. And if all you got is backer money, I don't think that a certain amount of decency with regards to how you spend that money would hurt.
They could of course release financial statements that prove that no backer money had been spent on the ship models, posters, expensive desks, sofas, spaceship doors, etc.. Yet they rather chose to refund people's pledges than show some numbers, so there you go.. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There is no documentation or plan for what the actual game systems are, but instead, what we have are nothing more than potential game assets, that Chris, being out of the industry for too long and refusing to listen to people who know more than him, thinks will plug together like Lego bricks and a game will pop out. The engine is a Frankenstein's monster of garbled code that's barely holding at the seams. Rather than being the typical state of a pre-alpha, CIG's engine, in contrast, gets weaker and more prone to catastrophic failure with every patch.
Never, ever, ever, ;) has a game developer ever released design docs while working on a project. Those are 100% internal documents ment for employees eyes only. Seeing as none of us work at CIG we are unfit to comment on the state of the current game design. Chris has also employed people from the current industry who know how to make games. And yes he is listening to them. Work is getting done. The fact that they have taken Cryengine and refactored the bejezus out of it shows you they have talent on their team. They are using an engine that has a great foundation. This is to be applauded because they have chosen not to re-invent the wheel but have instead adopted and re-engineered a wicked engine. As well the have engineers from Crytek itself who know this tech inside and out, which explains the things they have been able to do in the game.
Never, ever, ever, has a developer raised $130 million in crowdfunding, used that money to open 4 studios world wide, booked The Imaginarium for performance capture sessions with a Hollywood cast and 4 years later (if you're generous) hasn't delivered anything that resembles a product with working game systems. People tout that CIG is doing what nobody has tried/done before and that's why people should believe in it. How about fulfilling that "open development" promise for once, communicating setbacks, stupid mistakes, rollbacks, roadblocks, design issues, redesigns - you know all the things that happen during development that sometimes set you back to square one. How about being open about this right when it happens and not when it can't be avoided anymore (remember that Star Marine was "just weeks away" before being scrapped after months of silence)?
Being truly open about these things would also be something that nobody has tried/done before and it sure would be appreciated. That's why so many consider "The Pledge" to be unfulfilled/broken by CIG. I've experienced first hand what can and will go wrong during game development, yet none of these things ever came up in CIG's coverage.
Now - the engine. Choosing CryEngine was a questionable choice (why would you chose the engine with the comparably smallest dev community and thus lowest amount of available experience in the industry) right from the start. It wasn't exactly perfect for the original pitch, but it had the benefit of saving costs which - for a crowdfunded game - was appreciated.
But the moment that CIG chose to balloon the scope of the game, they should've thought long and hard about keeping that engine. At times it seems that the engine itself is actively fighting against CIG, exposing bugs and glitches the more they're changing it. The cruft that it has amassed over the years must be horrible (and whenever I see parts of the source code on Bugsmashers I get cold shivers).
Hindsight is 20/20 but I (and many others) thought that this engine was not a great choice in 2012. So far it hasn't proven us wrong.
Chris, in short, has no idea how to turn the ideas in his head into the game he's promised. He knows where he wants to be, but has no idea how to get there. That makes him an inappropriate steward of backer cash. Regardless of whether or not he came up with the idea, whether or not he's the visionary, all that is secondary - if he can't turn that vision into reality, and hand the reins of development and leadership to a competent individual and retain a position as lead designer, rather than CIG godhead, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Star Citizen can fulfill its potential.
I would disagree. They are making progress and building a foundation. As I stated before, in game development you find as you go along goals move. What you once thought was awesome and sweet can now become even awesomer and sweeter. They have a plan, they are executing it, it just isnt happening as publicly or as transparently as you would like. Got it. Well unfortunately that is how game development goes. They are not required to disclose everything to you. And yes I understand that people may be backers, but you backed the game to be released and not how it gets developed. And fortunately if this is something someone does not like, they can back out and get a refund. What is strange is the level of hate being generated by those who no longer agree with the game. You are 100% allowed to not want the game or even like how it is unfolding, but ad hominem attacks on Chris's character or his ability is strange. Have you ever even spoken to him, have you developed games at his level before? I believe not judging someone before walking a mile in their shoes might be a better way to approach this.
Well The Pledge that CR posted right after the first round of funding was achieved likes to have a word with you:
We, the Star Citizen team at Cloud Imperium, hereby promise to deliver the game you expect.
(cont'd)
We, the Developer, intend to treat you with the same respect we would give a publisher. You will receive regular updates about the progress of the game.
I've worked with investors/publishers and did pitches or regular dev updates for them. If I had been as "open" as CIG is, they would have demanded a change of leadership of the company and installed one of theirs to do oversight and keep us in check.
Analogies are a dime a dozen, but if Tesla behaved like CIG, they would still work on building the factory that produces the robots that one day will manufacture the Model S you pledged for and in the meantime have chosen that they also need to reinvent the actual construction robots.
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Again I don't know if those that tell others that they don't understand game development have ever worked in the industry before. And I can just speak from my experience in software and game development. So naturally my experience and knowledge is limited. But the image that is purported in the SC community is at times a gross misrepresentation of
- how Game development works
- the role of publishers/investors
- the influence(!) of publishers/investors
- the impact of CIG's efforts
among other things.
"Better is the enemy of good" and "perfection is achieved not when there's nothing to add, but when there's nothing left to remove" are as true as ever. Both are hard lessons to learn. Both help you in delivering actual products. Both assist you in "letting go". Those are good things! Constraints and deadlines fuel creativity. And they force you to come up with "good enough" solutions to focus on the bigger picture (which is a final product).
The reason us other developers don't chase those "impossible" (lol) solutions for the most part is not because they're "impossible" but rather that they're not worth it. If needed you can fake it and the player will never now (mostly because she usually just doesn't care). The time saved there can then be spent on other things.
CIG is therefore just another example of why crowdfunding the game development heroes of yesteryear is a bad idea for the most part. They go on and on about how publishers and investors have stifled their creativity and how their "disappointing" games could've been so much better. And big enough parts of the audience drank that kool-aid (the superiority complex of PC gamers probably helped as well).
