Oct 10 2012, 07:31 PM, updated 12y ago
For those who are wondering why the "naysayers" have no confidence with Star Citizen, please read the comment from an artist who is working in the game industry.
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Fairly well put, I share the sentiment.
RSI set themselves up with a hard job - I think they underestimated many things, from backer expectations to the technical roadmap they were forcing upon themselves by offering so many "ideas" as stretch goals.
When you go on Kickstarter asking for money, and it starts flowing in beyond your wildest dreams, it's difficult to keep your feet on the ground.
There are no shortage of great ideas in game development, but a lot of them - usually the coolest - never make into the game, because they're just so time consuming, and you have so many other things to do. And you can't solve it by throwing more people at the problem, because (this should be a well known fact by now), more bodies makes things worse, not better.
The post-kickstarter success has only made things worse. Not content with taking what they already have, they had to set up the most expensive looking website they could (suffers the same problem of excess - it's difficult to navigate), fill it with even more ways people can invest in the game (up to $15,000 !? and there are people complaining about Premium Beta prices!), provide all the episodic stories, and stage round-table "update" discussions with the developers. Honestly, I really felt for the artists - they have that haunted "leave me alone, I'm busy" air about them.
I don't know Chris Roberts, I've never met him or worked with anyone who has, but his public approach to problems - assuring everyone that the team will give daily updates, for example - is another alarm bell, a management approach which is hard to escape because it was set up as a promise "to our backers" right at the beginning (complete transparency). Is there anyone here working in games, that relishes having to make daily reports - not just to the boss, but joe public as well? It gets in the way.
Making games is hard. Thinking you can do it (with a middleware you didn't write, no less) and keep everyone informed every step of the way, while meeting deadlines for things that you haven't really considered, is dangerous.
I look forward to playing Star Citizen, and I've not got any interest in knocking it - I'm purely observing here - but, as an artist myself, I feel for the guys that are having to actually make this stuff. They're not the ones that made all the promises, but they sure as heck are the ones who're taking the beating and long hours over it.
I guess I should leave a cynical note after all: 300,000 triangles per player ship. What!?
RSI set themselves up with a hard job - I think they underestimated many things, from backer expectations to the technical roadmap they were forcing upon themselves by offering so many "ideas" as stretch goals.
When you go on Kickstarter asking for money, and it starts flowing in beyond your wildest dreams, it's difficult to keep your feet on the ground.
There are no shortage of great ideas in game development, but a lot of them - usually the coolest - never make into the game, because they're just so time consuming, and you have so many other things to do. And you can't solve it by throwing more people at the problem, because (this should be a well known fact by now), more bodies makes things worse, not better.
The post-kickstarter success has only made things worse. Not content with taking what they already have, they had to set up the most expensive looking website they could (suffers the same problem of excess - it's difficult to navigate), fill it with even more ways people can invest in the game (up to $15,000 !? and there are people complaining about Premium Beta prices!), provide all the episodic stories, and stage round-table "update" discussions with the developers. Honestly, I really felt for the artists - they have that haunted "leave me alone, I'm busy" air about them.
I don't know Chris Roberts, I've never met him or worked with anyone who has, but his public approach to problems - assuring everyone that the team will give daily updates, for example - is another alarm bell, a management approach which is hard to escape because it was set up as a promise "to our backers" right at the beginning (complete transparency). Is there anyone here working in games, that relishes having to make daily reports - not just to the boss, but joe public as well? It gets in the way.
Making games is hard. Thinking you can do it (with a middleware you didn't write, no less) and keep everyone informed every step of the way, while meeting deadlines for things that you haven't really considered, is dangerous.
I look forward to playing Star Citizen, and I've not got any interest in knocking it - I'm purely observing here - but, as an artist myself, I feel for the guys that are having to actually make this stuff. They're not the ones that made all the promises, but they sure as heck are the ones who're taking the beating and long hours over it.
I guess I should leave a cynical note after all: 300,000 triangles per player ship. What!?
Source
In my opinion and as someone who backed over a dozen crowd funded projects, I find Star Citizen to be the worst crowd funded projects so far. First of all, it is alright to go a bit nuts with stretch goals in crowd funding with Kickstarter. Adding lofty stretch goals such as FPS module or massive frigates like Idris for the sake of generating hype is a terrible idea as this is feature creep. Feature creep is always discouraged in any projects as it just kept increasing the scope of work while increasing the production cost and time needed, which at the end, the project might never finish if you constantly adding features to it. Not to mention, towels and other cosmetic nonsense are still being added as a gesture of thanks to backers after adding another stretch goals with every million collected that contribute to constant feature creep. Instead spending time to ensure the game is fun and work on the actual game systems. At the same time, actual technical updates that includes development milestones, tech demo, work in progress gameplay and so on are rare and far in between in comparison to fan arts, theory crafting, fiction and more pledge ships. The developers, Cloud Imperium Games(CIG) constantly wants to hype up the game to generate funds to run their massive over 200 developer team while unwilling to show actual game progress. As time goes by, this crowd funded project seemed more like a pyramid or ponzi scheme except no one in the public will get any return of investment.
As time goes on, the crowd funding just get more and more absurd, first with the $200 Constellation which was bad enough, then the $1000 Idris along with numerous pledge ships that cost hundreds of dollars. That is still not enough for CIG as they even went on to add microtrasactions where players can buy in-game currency with real money even when the game does not have anything playable yet. Not to mention, even a monthly subscription system that allows subscribers to obtain information earlier that made it even more absurd. They even took the time to publish impressive artwork books, patches, polo Ts and so on when the game isnt even playable for the public. Imagine if EA did that, they are set to win Worst Company in America for the next 2 years but since this is Chris Roberts, the "savoir" of the space sims, this is all fine by the fans.
The fans, I say these are the most absurd people ever seen in a crowd funded game. There is nothing wrong to be hyped with a game as I am very hyped for Wasteland 2 or Divinity Original Sin but they gone to absurd lengths to form organisations(or clans in most games) when the game has absolutely nothing playable, probably to wait for the game together when the actual game is heading to become a vaporware. Or spending hundreds of dollars for some virtual space ship when most of them arent even finished yet but they decided to call it "pledging" after a year the crowd funding has ended. On the other hand, these people does not allow any criticism on their beloved game that they had "invested" in. To them, it is "In Chris Roberts, we trust" because Chris Roberts promised a lot of impressive cool sound features to keep them excited, then behave childishly or offensive when people criticise their game. Just have a look at the messy General Chat forum. These are the kind of people that you will be playing with in the final game, if it actually comes out at the end.
There are plenty of good ideas in the game so far but the problem is, the scope of work is massive with nothing delivered to the backers yet after numerous delays. Chris Roberts and the executives think that it is wise to get more and more employers to expand the size of the team from 30 all the way to 200 plus instead of controlling the feature creep and have a focused scope of work. With that many man power, CIG still could not release a basic dog fighting module after approximately 6 delays which is ridiculous for a 44 million dollars crowd funded project with 2 years+ of development passed. At very least, this signals bad management in CIG or over bloated scope of work where the massive team could not finish it. Other crowd funded projects with smaller budget managed to deliver their promises mostly on time without having ridiculous project scope.
I hope that you wont pledge for this game until it reaches Beta when most features are implemented.
td:dr: DO NOT PLEDGE FOR THE GAME NOW. It is becoming the next Duke Nukem Forever or Daikatana at the moment.
This post has been edited by Cheesenium: May 31 2014, 11:52 PM
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Waiting for a game that needs it... was into flight sim and Arma 2. After reinstalling my rigg can't be bothered to reconfigure it just yet.
Hopefully it will hit 5m soon. 
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