I do not have any opinion about this conflict, but what I do know is that RSI is committed to develop as best as they can, but also that they made (and maybe are still making?) the error of thinking that more money equals less dev time and more functionalities.
I retweeted it as I figured the conversation would be of interest to many of the people who follow me. I generally agree with @Tjafaas. I think there are some serious problems over at CIG when you consider E:D raised less money and has already shipped their game. DS hits the nail on the head with a number of his observations however I also think many of his comments are needlessly inflammatory, which you can argue is his calling card, and that his LoD game seems to be widely regarded as absolutely terrible. The Steam comments are pretty damning.
On one hand, we have a very ambitious project with lots of money that decided for better or worse to extend their dev cycle and go with parallel development of a very broad scope game to improve quality on the released product. and on the other hand we have a just as ambitious project that rushed out an empty, narrowed scope version of their game that wasn’t ready for release and now has unfixable problems as a result, they cant do a reset or fix their price balancing easily once they left beta. And now they’re trying to charge more for the other stuff to puzzle it together after the fact in an expansion format where it will never really come together as well as a parallel game design. Quite frankly, i prefer the CIG plan, not that it’s viable in every situation, but they had the resources to do so even if ED didn’t. I get the impression CIG was initially planning to take the same route as ED, their initial development time estimates were short and would have likely ended similarly to ED with a lackluster release.
I’ve waited countless years for a good space sim, the last thing i want is in the final stretch for someone to come along and say, “Well we have all this money, so we’ll just bank it all for our next project instead of extending the cycle just a few more years”. You cant just pump all your money into blitzing a project and expect something good to go out either, it will be more efficiently spent over a longer period.
Speaking of, star citizen’s social module released yesterday(or the day before?). I got into the 2nd test wave and while i cant post screenshots because of a media NDA, i am allowed to say that it’s coming along quite well. The new augmented reality style hud is nice as is their chat UI and 6 fucking dance emotes plus like 30-40 others which are all grouped up so im not entirely sure how many there are.
I’d like to see a finished Infinity: Battlespace before any staff at INovae start to make comments on their concerns about Star Citizen, E:D, or any other project. Sooner or later the attention will be focused squarely on you, so you better deliver
I’ve become more and more sceptical about SC since giving them some of my money, but I like to think it’s only healthy scepticism. I recognise that DS is making valid points, though it pains me to agree with him given his less than stellar record himself.
Such as?
It’s not just about the money though, the way this game is being developed feels really disjointed, and some of the decisions they’ve made leave me wondering. I wouldn’t necessarily have picked CryEngine for this kind of game, for instance. I’m also not fond of the way they release these “modules”. They feel like compartmentalised mini-games, with some figment of how they connect to the whole, but still rather disjointed. In that regards though, the footage for multi-crew vehicles was somewhat reassuring.
Their ship pricing and balancing schema which was more or less asspulled the week before release. Even though their “mmo” is extremely lackluster and doesnt have too many persistent elements, when you have such high prices it makes it difficult to simply completely rebalance without killing what economy you had, additionally their implementation of lots of other mechanics like exploration and mining limit the usefulness in the mmo, all that stuff is pretty much permanently broken now. Once you say “ok, there will be no more wipes” there are a lot of things you just stop being able to change easily, stuff that’s so more difficult to change post-release than pre-release that you know in a game with such limited development resources it will just never happen. It wouldn’t be a problem if the state that stuff was left in wasn’t so horrid.
I was wondering about the engine choice as well, so far it seems to be working. At the very least, they got enough money to brute force through it and ended up getting enough cryengine devs to help them with that.
I dont know whats giving off the impression of excess compartmentalization. You can eject from your ship in AC that’s released right now and start shooting your energy pistol at passing ships, not that it’s effective unless they stop and let you hammer their cockpit. Free flight has had basic turret gunner functionality for a few months now, as well as the obvious “land, walk around, mag boots, jetpack in zero g, shoot at other players” stuff. The new social module release features work in the other games modes where relevant. Their tutorial has you walking around, boarding a ship, then manually taking off from inside a hangar, showing that the hangar module has the functionality it needs to integrate with the bigger game. If your expecting them to have released a persistent universe type thing already i don’t see how that would work in early development stages with their design goals.
I haven’t tried the social module yet, I must admit. I was waiting for something a bit more significant than a hangar and an arena shooter before dipping back into it. And to be honest, I’m not really sure what to be expecting, because I’m unsure where the core focus of this game really lies, but whatever it is I don’t feel like it’s really seen the light of day yet. But typically if you’re doing this sort of early access development, you start around what the core of your game activity is and build outwards (in theory what E:D is doing, but smaller Steam Early Access releases like Prison Architect and KSP are better comparisons). You should always feel like you know how what you’re currently playing ties into intended experience at “release”.
I’m also not entirely sure I agree with your criticisms of E:D. There are always going to be things they can do to change mistakes they made or fix features that were implemented poorly, if you take the correct approach to fixing them. Changing “in-flight” software isn’t exactly uncommon. I also don’t think adjusting the economy would be particularly difficult if they wanted to do so. In fact, they already did as part of the Powerplay updates by adjusting the amount missions pay out.
The real problem I face at the moment personally is that most games in this genre, and in MMO type games in general, require more time than I’m willing to give and aren’t really compelling enough to draw me back in. Surface landing might draw me back to E:D for some time, as it fills in a void made when Bioware decided to remove the Mako from the ME series. Personally, I’m hoping, some day, INS make Battlescape a compelling enough and good enough arena space shooter to keep my interest for more than a couple of months, and the same when the Infinity MMO eventually gets made.
SC is using CryEngine because at the time when they started development (one year prior to their crowdfunding?) it was the shiniest engine out there with a proven track record. Unreal 4 was anounced and released quite some time after their KS. Frostbite was Dice/EA only and unity was still at version 4.
So more like they’ve had it in development since Elite 2. Which, if you think about it, is only about 3 times longer than Flavien’s been working on INE (under various names). In his spare time. As a one person project for most of that time.
That’s interesting, and also further reinforces the point I was heading toward which was that CIG made a sensible choice with their engine considering the comparative timeframes these projects have been worked on.
Looking at the original goal for SC, Chris would have taken CryEngine and made an acceptable version of Wing Commander and Freelancer blended together. A few ships, some story etc.
Once they passed the point of being self-sufficient (ie, no requirement for private investment), they had the capacity to take onboard experts to customise the engine to do what they want, instead of fitting their game into a CryEngine-shaped hole.
I’m inclined to agree with this statement however UE4 was announced in May of 2012 and I have to wonder if he had even bothered to talk to Epic. In hindsight it seems like he should have switched to UE4 after his KS campaign was finished as Crytek seems to be undergoing severe financial hardship, they’ve bled a lot of their top talent, and continuing development on the engine appears to have more or less halted. Of course I doubt it was obvious that UE4 was going to become so much more dominant at the time.
I do have memory of Chris saying somewhere that he did consider both engines, but I think the contributing factor at the time was that CryEngine had the FPS style he preferred (ie. an easy pre-made “tactical”-style FPS to shoehorn into a low budget space game).
[EDIT: From what I can find it was to do with CryEngine handling vehicles better than Unreal. The visuals were also more oriented toward photorealism versus a more stylised look in UE.]
I’m not sure what the situation is exactly with Crytek itself, but CIG have absorbed quite a few ex-Crytek employees at Foundry 42 Frankfurt and are obivously still getting support for the engine under their existing contract. It makes sense that Crytek would support a project that could lead to a serious boost for their company.
Yes, but that wasn’t necessarily a given at the time. It’s only even become a possibility because Crytek themselves aren’t doing so hot at the moment. That wasn’t something they could of banked on when they picked the engine.
You could say the same about id Tech5 (or whatever it is these days). It descends more or less directly from the original Quake engine.
To be honest, I don’t see much about CE that lends itself to space FPS more than UE4, or any of the many other engines available on the market. It’s also fairly clear that what they’ve tried to do with this engine has unleashed a reasonable amount of technical debt, which should be expected from an engine that wasn’t designed for this kind of game.
Though I’m not saying they should change engine now, they’re a bit too far down the road for that, and it would piss the backers off if they threw a significant amount of money at a dead end.
Is that really to do with the engine though? Besides, I never found Crysis to be much more photorealistic than other contemporary games or modern games. Hell, these days, even Titanfall looks pretty realistic, and that’s in the Source engine ffs, I remember having to pick my jaw up off the floor when I learnt that, because I didn’t believe a game like that could have been made in that engine.
Of course, the reason for picking the Source engine was fairly straightforward for them I imagine, it had a shared ancestry with the engine that Infinity Ward used.
I was only reiterating Chris’s own reasons, but yes there are plenty of reasons why other engines could have been used to achieve the same result. I guess it’s lucky for CIG that they have decent funding to afford to drastically change the engine.
