Certainly at some point past with the noob-friendly content added to Elite on 23 April.
He’s made awesome stuff in the past so I’d agree with you. He’s like a thoroughbred without a rider; with nobody holding the reins he’s running really fast but going nowhere.
I once watched a documentary on the making of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. A lot of footage of them working on the film and interviews with people who worked on it. George Lucas had 100% control over the film and everyone was afraid to tell him no or otherwise offer criticism. The end result was not a failure but has been considered by many to be the worst of the Star Wars films. And the worst parts were the things that went straight from Lucas’s mind to the screen.
Will Gamers Ever Get to Play Star Citizen?
In other news, there are new microtransactions in the form of motorcycles, which reportedly cease to be available today.
I guess people are still paying for the same reason people might attend a game of Brockian Ultra Cricket:
"Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall round them.
The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what’s going on leads them to imagine that it’s a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history."
“Chris Roberts will have to give up the rights of the game to one of these investors.”
I don’t see how that’s inevitable, to be honest. He’s chugged this gravy train along for years with no particular sign of it stopping, selling ships that show no sign of being entered into the game to fund it. The funds will presumably stop sooner or later, but there’s no guarantee that any further work would be done on the game beyond that. There will be a final version, but there’s no reason at this point to believe it’ll be remotely playable.
Does anyone know of any ships that people have bought that have since been entered into the game, after purchase? And what percentage of ship types that have been for sale are currently available to fly?
M. Moshinaly presumably means corporate investors. We know at least one’s involved.
Star Citizen is getting more competition, this time in the form of a Warframe expansion.
[sub]No, the article is by a different Sean Murray.[/sub]
And Elite: Dangerous is getting fleet carriers.
Another year or two of development and Star Citizen will be able to pack it in, proclaiming that they’ve successfully delivered on all their promises - they just happen to be in other games is all.
I was reading back through the thread and thought I’d update a post from a year ago.
Me in 2015:
Me in 2016:
Me in 2017:
Me in 2018:
I** did **end up buying No Man’s Sky not too long after that last quote, and I put over a hundred hours into it before setting it aside. Last month, fans of the game set up a billboard outside the dev’s office to say thank you. How’d they pay for it? Crowdfunding. They raised more than they needed and donated the excess to a children’s hospital.
NMS - a game which has experienced a complete arc of ambition, betrayal, and redemption, all in the lifespan of a single thread about a game which has yet to be released.
Sadly, I think Star Citizen IS becoming the “future” of gaming. That is to say, grandiose, crowd-sourced, early alpha release, open world games that promise unprecedented levels of interactivity and content and ultimately either fall short or wallow in development indefinitely. I’ve seen this in both the “sci fi universe simulator” genre with games like Spore, Space Engineers, No Mans Sky, Elite Dangerous and others as well as the survival genre with games like DayZ, H1Z1, Rust, SCUM, etc.
I don’t think it has anything to do with “creatives” vs “beancounters”. It has more to do with a) being able to turn an abstract concept into an actual playable game and b) the difficulty in creating a real working universe with enough content to actually be interesting.
What seems to happen is these games linger on for years in a sort of development hell with a user community divided between “fuck these scam artists” and “this game will be awesome when it’s finally released”. At some point, the development house declares “Mission Accomplished” and some buggy, crappy version of the game gets “released”. Maybe a version is also ported over to XBox or Playstation. Of course, by then no one cares because no one plays it anymore.
There are games like Star Citizen, and games like Subnautica. The future isn’t all doom.
And games that continuously receive new features after release aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Innovate and keep players interested or stagnate and die.
Developers of online games also need some leeway when players start behaving in ways not sufficiently anticipated. All the min/maxers in CoH, for example.
ISTM, the only really broken part of Elite is the background simulation (BGS). Some of this is caused by bored griefers exploiting loopholes in the BGS, some by deliberate interference from haxxors.
(bolding mine) And on that note, Star Citizen [del]finally announced the release date of their game[/del]announced yet another update-Alpha 3.6, a complete Law and Crime System overhaul, as described here. Damn thing is more complicated than real life.
And you’ll need to download a new launcher, too.
The bug fixes in that update show how unpolished that alpha is. It’s truly an alpha.
I think that’s fine, so long as “features and content” aren’t really “shit that should have been in the game from the initial release date”.
There’s just too much unfinished games being passed off as “the future of PC gaming” simply based on what people think the pre-release alpha version “might” become.
Even looking at one of my favorite city-builder games of all time, Cities: Skylines (which has like a 9/10 rating) is actually kind of crap in its unmodded, no DLC form. And I don’t just mean user-generated visual content that lets you add a Starbucks or the architecture of Paris to your city. I mean mods that fundamentally change the interface or even way the game is played, but have become essential parts of the game. Stuff like managing traffic or just making the graphics not look like oversatured, non-aliased crap. An argument can be made that much of that work should have been completed by the developers. Particularly as the software company doesn’t maintain them and you are SOL if the next version of the game causes those mods to break something and the author has moved on with his life.
There’s a difference between “shit that should have been in” and “shit that been promised to be in but wasn’t”. 
The former can usually be bypassed by waiting for a GOTY edition rather than being one of those gamers who feel they absolutely must buy whatever is the next big thing coming to market, especially if the publisher is well known for putting out a bunch of DLC (e.g.: EA and Bethesda).
Anyway, I primarily meant online games. At least some publishers are attempting to put in everything that had been promised; ain’t no way in hell Star Citizen is going to have everything that’s been promised without being a quagmire.
Seems like every time there’s a new alpha, someone has written a new article criticizing the game.