Here are some slow-burn answers to questions long since buried.
First, you may ask, why the thread necro? Well, why the Pledge necro in the post above? Why, for that matter, should this site keep reminding people of the long and short history of what's going on.
Now, where are all these new people coming from? We've been here since the beginning. I saw the SC Kickstarter launch; I have friends who bought in. I followed the Escapist article/ CR vs. DS debate. I read what's going on here with the same interest I followed
Tomi Ahonen's blog during the years that Elop took Nokia from industry leader to zero. Now, that Ahonen guy is crazy and has nutty ideas that break the rules of physics, like Apple releasing a 100-megapixel pocket camera, but he was right about Nokia, and, in his increasingly long posts, he laid out the case which was fundamentally right from the start. So too, I'll go on record as saying that Dr. Smart has and has had some bad ideas and some crazy ideas, but when he talks about SC having an "Extinction Level Event", I have to agree that this won't end well.
Any doubters just need to see the 600i: they're basically selling a space-vagina whose sole merit over other ships is that it's more expensive. I'm surprised y'all haven't started calling it the "whale-boat". Sure, you all deride this whole operation as "Selling JPEGs", but that deflationary reading really leaves aside the monstrous problem that has existed since the beginning: it's not just that they won't ever build those ships they've been advertising with their fantastic, sizzle-rich commercials; it's that they can't. Assume they somehow actually build this thing that they're promising: a space sim that obeys some rules of physics and breaks others, with a variety of weapons and crafts.
Now, given the constraints of this system, we as gamers and developers know that things work in-game differently than as planned. Will their "Pseudo-Firefly Class" boat be the best at smuggling? If their missions involve sending two teams at the same chunk of space, how much is your underpowered "low sig" engines gonna help you?
In short, before you can even start making pretty commercials about concept ships, you need to inhabit that simulated space and come up with the vehicles that make sense for the simulation; to do it the other way only makes sense if you have a huge marketing budget to overpromise and underdeliver, which is also what scammers do.
But this is only one small concern in a pile of many larger ones as this project bloats its way to inevitable collapse. By the way, train wrecks are train wrecks because you stand haplessly by as they SLOWLY dump all that kinetic energy all over the place in a twisted, horrific display of bent metal and broken bodies. What we're in for is certainly a train wreck; it might be an E.L.E. too.
It somewhat reminds me of the train wreck of World War II Online, where a group of dangerously incompetent sim fans decided in 1999 to build a WW2 MMO. To test their concepts, they picked the Battle of France, with the plan to have the whole war simulated at some point. The development period featured a hilarious invasion of Team Fortress 2 fans who insisted that their game would be the only true realistic battlefield. For a week in June 2001, WW2OL was the top-selling game in the US. And it imploded due to being a downright unplayable, buggy mess with all kinds of weird decisions made by a team that had no business trying. They shipped a CD with code so broken, when the user connected on launch day to their servers, s/he had to download and install a "patch" that was the entire game, making WW2OL
de facto the first chart-topping game to be distributed entirely via digital download. And yet only yesterday did they launch on Steam, as an
Early Access game. I suppose Early Access in the sense that in the US, a kid who gets his driving license a few months after his sixteenth birthday can be said to have Early Access to an automobile.
But yes, I bought a copy of WW2OL in 2001. Why? Because watching the development/release train wreck I felt was worth fifty bucks.
Now I look at SC, and WW2OL is the best possible outcome for them: a buggy, stripped down product appealing to a niche audience that can fund a skeleton crew. Think of it as the white dwarf after the coming supernova.
More likely, we're getting a neutron star or a black hole, sucking in half of the Kickstarter ecosystem with it. So yeah, not exactly an E.L.E. or a trainwreck, but a supernova.
That's entertainment worth $50, but certainly not worth a home, a love, a friend.
[/rant]
