Roberts Space Industries released an assortment of new trailers for its epicly crowdfunded space sim Star Citizen, including the first look at the game's so-called FPS module, which plans to offer an up close and personal shooter mode to the mix.
Oddly, official reports are still referring to the development team working on FPS mode as "REDACTED", but community speculation seems to suggest that it's actual Illfonic, the Colorado-based studio responsible for the retail iteration of fast-paced shooter Nexuiz. An announcment post promises that "more will be revealed" at PAX Australia, the public videogames festival that will take place in Melbourne from Oct 31 - Nov 2.
This game is a real bitser. Maybe in 5 years it'll be complete enough to enjoy.
I want to see it do good things, but I feel they haven't got the right people to polish this game off, ever. Time will tell though, I'd buy it if it's ever finished..
I've got it and played it a bit now. It certainly is crude in places, and somewhat polished in others, bit weird. The dog-fighting gameplay is pretty fun though.
Money can easily be mismanaged, the scope of the game is huge, whilst achievable a bit of mismanagement and misdirection will eat up there funds and time quite quickly. It's partially why no publisher would go near them to make a game like this, They can claim all the like that there are fans willing to fund it, and whilst true it's a small group of people that keep topping up the funding, it's not a great accurate reflection on what the sales would of been like had the game been published and funded like any other AAA title.
Ignoring my cynicism, I have backed the game and I look forward to playing it one day and wish the developers all the success in the world.
Yeah, after doing a bit of reading about the story behind the making of Starlancer and Freelancer, I'm dubious they're going to pull it off. If they do, I'll certainly eat my words and buy a copy, but until then I remain skeptical.
Can't really compare its current state to a lot of other games, getting to see how the sausage is made so-to-speak makes it a lot different than the way we usually experience titles like this, where a publisher might only start actually showing the game in trailers a few months before retail launch.
Star Citizen has only been in development since the end of 2012, so not even 2 years. Even Call of Duty games have a 3 year dev cycle now, and I would say this game is more comparable to an MMO than a scripted shooter, which would put average dev time more like somewhere around the 5 year mark. I can't imagine games like WoW and Diablo 3 to have been as playable at their 2 year mark.
I've been looking more and more at Elite: Dangerous for my space needs. It's looking just as promising but more cohesive and has a less flashy feel to it, Star Citizen feels like it's doing a lot of things just for show. SC is delivering what it's been saying, in bits and pieces, but there's always such a spectacle to things.
Its kind of a contrived look behind the scenes anyway, no in development game is going to look that good during development. Instead of going through and blocking everything out, and prototyping everything and getting it end-to-end playable, then coming back through later on with an art pass to put in final art, animations, etc, they're taking chunks of it all the way through to mostly-done right now so that people can try it out. When you're a guy who's 10+ years removed from the industry, with a history already of mis-managing large projects, changing the development cycle up like that and turning priorities on their heads surely isn't going to be helping.
When you're a guy who's 10+ years removed from the industry, with a history already of mis-managing large projects, changing the development cycle up like that and turning priorities on their heads surely isn't going to be helping.
Not unless the changing of the development cycle actually brings it inline to the way you manage. So what might be a mismanaged traditional development cycle can be a well managed non-traditional cycle. Things have happened like that before.
Perhaps by being 'forced' into releasing things like Dog Fight module and FPS module, in chunks, it will be like being forced to hand in draft copies of assignments so that you can actually get things done (and have people correct the mistakes for your final copy).
At any rate, so far he and his team have produced what they promised. The netcode isn't s*** either (no rubber banding, feels responsive). So imo they have nailed a solid first draft for the Space Sim bit.
The FPS part, imo, will be harder to get a solid feel. It seems quite easy to make a bodgy FPS that feels wrong.
I'm glad he is farming out various aspects of the game to other teams, and other leaders making design choices. As long as he can keep the design choices of others inline with the overall feel of the game that will be good.
It is certainly a big challenging game to make, and would certainly take a monumental effort. Credit were credit is due, they are doing well so far.
I'm just glad we are getting space sims again, and especially ones with large enough scopes that they can give EVE a run for its money. With Elite: Dangerous, No Man's Sky and Star Citizen all heading to our screens, it is going to be one hell of a fun ride.
There is a new breed of space sim coming soon, called Infinity, mainly its their Battlescale release on Kickstarter which has a real sized Sol system space combat and exploration game. Anyway they have the technology already (been working on it for a decade or so), its less likely to disappoint then SC which sure looks fantastic but I'm sceptical of the Crytek engines ability to scale up for such a game.
I expect SC to be one of those games were everything is discovered in the first week because afterall the levels are 30km by 30km (or less), compared to Infinity:Battlescape which will be the true size of the Solar system.
Posted 10:47am 18/8/14
I want to see it do good things, but I feel they haven't got the right people to polish this game off, ever. Time will tell though, I'd buy it if it's ever finished..
Posted 11:40am 18/8/14
Posted 12:07pm 18/8/14
Posted 01:04pm 18/8/14
Posted 01:12pm 18/8/14
Ignoring my cynicism, I have backed the game and I look forward to playing it one day and wish the developers all the success in the world.
Posted 01:14pm 18/8/14
Posted 01:27pm 18/8/14
I was thinking the opposite, it's too big now not to be disappointing.
Posted 02:24pm 18/8/14
Star Citizen has only been in development since the end of 2012, so not even 2 years. Even Call of Duty games have a 3 year dev cycle now, and I would say this game is more comparable to an MMO than a scripted shooter, which would put average dev time more like somewhere around the 5 year mark. I can't imagine games like WoW and Diablo 3 to have been as playable at their 2 year mark.
Posted 04:14pm 18/8/14
It's looking just as promising but more cohesive and has a less flashy feel to it, Star Citizen feels like it's doing a lot of things just for show.
SC is delivering what it's been saying, in bits and pieces, but there's always such a spectacle to things.
Posted 04:33pm 18/8/14
Posted 06:22pm 18/8/14
Not unless the changing of the development cycle actually brings it inline to the way you manage. So what might be a mismanaged traditional development cycle can be a well managed non-traditional cycle. Things have happened like that before.
Perhaps by being 'forced' into releasing things like Dog Fight module and FPS module, in chunks, it will be like being forced to hand in draft copies of assignments so that you can actually get things done (and have people correct the mistakes for your final copy).
At any rate, so far he and his team have produced what they promised. The netcode isn't s*** either (no rubber banding, feels responsive). So imo they have nailed a solid first draft for the Space Sim bit.
The FPS part, imo, will be harder to get a solid feel. It seems quite easy to make a bodgy FPS that feels wrong.
I'm glad he is farming out various aspects of the game to other teams, and other leaders making design choices. As long as he can keep the design choices of others inline with the overall feel of the game that will be good.
It is certainly a big challenging game to make, and would certainly take a monumental effort. Credit were credit is due, they are doing well so far.
Posted 07:26pm 18/8/14
Posted 07:28pm 18/8/14
Posted 12:00am 19/8/14
I'd like to see a mix of 'FPS' flight instead of 3rd person/freecam with the complexity of Eve.
Last I saw the Eve universe map, it looked bland. I think 4 alliances hold all of nullsec now if the shot I saw was accurate.
Posted 05:42am 19/8/14
I expect SC to be one of those games were everything is discovered in the first week because afterall the levels are 30km by 30km (or less), compared to Infinity:Battlescape which will be the true size of the Solar system.