starchip
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That is what I expected, funny how he came into all of this, when he is not able to do any real work, nor he had the charm and charisma to be a cheerleader.
I wonder what is the role of Ben Lesnick in SC project? He is a forum mod, is that all he does? Master of echo chamber.
<span style=”color: #222222; font-family: ElizabethSerif, Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 28px;”>The definition of Alpha is “all features must be present in the game and testable”. Once a title is declared Alpha, there should be no changes other than bug fixes (Content Lock)</span>
http://kotaku.com/after-ten-years-in-the-business-i-know-a-thing-or-two-1704949416
Star Citizen is far from Alpha. No where close to pre-Alpha.
SC’s ill management is not only limited to the technical problem. The ship sales which is the main income source CIG’s income, has already over expanded the game’s content. Every game follow an unwritten rule of content delivery, this is rarely aware but very important in game design, the game’s content must carefully regulated that it dished out in a specific speed in a specific order in order to craft the experience. This is true for both standalone and online gaming, no one in WOW had epic gears epic boss the first time they log into vanilla. These stuff suppose to be accessible a long time after the game’s introduction. What we see ships in SC are reserved content being introduced to the game long before the game come into exist, spoiler is the least of the problem in this case, the real kicker is planned ship has already being sold at inflated price, the amount of variety must some how standout from each other in the few role that is, this is going to be a balancing nightmare. Under the normal dev cycle of an MMO, new gears come later can obsolete early gears that already being played to death, there will be less to no balancing consideration. In the case of SC, all of those have to jump in at the same time, the more “weapons” in a game the more likely to have things marginalized (obsolete out of box) due to limited roles better fit for better option. If they gonna make things average people gonna complain their money did not brought them advantage, if they make things out of proportion people gonna complain this is not fair. To make difference between multiple brand of long range bomber and multiple brand of short range bomber require not multiple game’s content world, but multiple genre that deal with a similar theme of areal warfare, with each ship playing their own game. This underlying complexity far exceed CIG’s bold promise. CR is approaching game development from a user’s perspective not from a dev’s. This is the greatest red flag early on that whiteknight willfully ignore, and is the reason why seasoned dev leave one after another. CR and most of his “boddy” did not know that the complex world in a game is mostly a by product of psychology, 99% of any game world is never build into the game, they are imagination triggered by the combo of asset and script. The tanks planes makes you feels like you are fighting a war, the faction badge makes you feels like you are leading a country, under the hood they are bunch of boxes spiting on each other. The bare bone mechanic is as boring as math problem out of text book. A dev would start with the “math” part, then the math dictate what shinny spaceship going to be. The kid playing game would first imagine what the shinny spaceship gonna be and leave the “math” to someone else. An ironic evidence of this is many in game organization pop out left and right on the CIG forum, people are already imagine they are playing the best game ever, without having the game, pathetic just pathetic.
I don’t know did anyone point this out, it has to do with SC’s art direction. Everything is as complicated as you can imagine, like they cant find a better way to cram in as many polygon feature as possible, all those ships are way over detailed for their own good, everything in your sight has like 100 moving parts. Worse is those aren’t pure eye sour. It seems SC want those “parts” to have a meaning, which means each one is an object that has a roster of status to keep track, engine avionic weapon and other modules. The complicated ship objects has damage status, damage visual effect. Add this on top of the ship variety with complex state to set them apart, add all of these to FPS perspective, to the “seamless loading”. While everything is rendered in Crysis like visual. Most PC can barely run this standalone, even the high end gears cannot fully take on this challenge. Now this is “standalone”, SC is an MMO that play over the internet, there will be a shit load of data to transmit, things are already lagging and broken with handful people testing, what will happen when you have like something 100 multi-crew ship screwing around the verse in the same server at same time? Remember this is just for a bunch ships in void, the game also promise rich environmental factors in a unbelievably large universe, things like you can access every detail on a map, procedural generated planets, and remember, all of these are rendered in Crysis graphic. Are we going to have a dedicated fiber optic express just for this? Im not familiar with internet gaming, but I suppose there is a reason why internet game usually cant look as good as standalone game. MMOs like WOW was way behind in graphic even back then, does that have a thing to do with “bandwidth”?? Correct me if Im wrong. I predict they cant even deliver 10% of their promise, when money is running out, there will be cuts, rushes, and desperation to cover their ass, the final product will be totally FUBR, poor fans may keep looking their ship in a hanger while it last, playing in the real verse can be dangerous, sense the program is unpredictable, 1000 dollar ship can disappear for no reason, once its gone in the verse, its are gone. The dev is in full steam to model JPEG, cook more staged demo, milk the last of the hardcore fans down to the last penny.
