Samtemdo8 said:
Do you harbour the same doubts for this Squadron 42 side-game?
I harbour doubts.
I mean, let's talk about boring corporate stuff for a second. In a normal video game studio, a game has one or more
directors and one or more
producers (sometimes called project managers). The director's job is to oversee the creative process of the game, to come up with the concept and cool ideas and to make the game as fun as possible. The producer's job is to ensure the game is delivered on time, and that the project is workable and achievable and doesn't go over budget. This often means the director and producer are in conflict, as part of the producer's job is to force the director to kill their darlings and compromise for the sake of completing the project.
In Cloud Imperium games, Chris Roberts is the "chairman & CEO" but in practice he has a vast and nebulous role which effectively leaves him as the director of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 while also being unaccountable to any producer. This probably seems great if you're a fan who is fully on the hype train, it means the Roberts can do whatever he wants without being held back by the crass demands of actually producing a sellable product. In reality, however, it's a terrible, terrible idea and you can never, never trust anything good to come out of this process, and that would be true even if Roberts was not an easily distracted obsessive perfectionist who has a long history of not being able to finish games on time or within budget.
Anyway, let's move on.
There's a restaurant in New York which sells a $2000 pizza. It's literally topped with flakes of 24 karat gold, and is essentially just a mix of really stupidly expensively ingredients thrown together like Foie Gras, Truffles and Caviar. It is, by all accounts,
horrible, because it turns out just throwing a bunch of expensive things together doesn't make something which tastes good, but it exists because people assume that something which is expensive must automatically be good, or why else would it be expensive?
Even if we take out the huge problems with Star Citizen/S42 development, we are still left with a big problem. The problem that it is a $2000 pizza. Everything about the game seems designed to give the impression that it had a lot of money spent on it, or that no compromise was made in its creation, but that doesn't translate into a good game. Cryengine was designed for first person shooters. It's actually a terrible engine for the game they want to make, but it has a reputation for being visually stunning. It looks expensive. It looks high quality, therefore that's the one. Then there's the cast, which is like a nerd culture dream team. But hollywood has professional casting agents for a reason. Just putting big names or recognisable people in every single role does not make for a good cast. It makes for a lot of
"hey kids, it's (literally) Mark Hamill!" moments and again, it makes something look expensive, but expensive does not mean good. When you write roles specifically for actors based on their previous work, you're probably not going to get original or interesting performances.
Finally, since Star Citizen and Squadron 42 use the same basic engine and framework, we can infer from the state of Star Citizen that development of the actual gameplay part of S42 is.. well.. pretty dismal. People have been waiting for fundamental improvements to the core systems, or even for those systems to be added in at all, for years now. Meanwhile, development seems to be focused on pumping out more and more buyable ships because, frankly, that's where the money is now.
Samtemdo8 said:
We just wanted a simple Sci-Fi Flight-Sim Action game ala Wing Commander and Star Wars X-Wing.
Well, if that were true, and I don't think it is because I'm pretty sure if you brought that up to the Star Citizen community you're going to get accused of being goonFUD or some bullshit, I'm kind of with you. That is totally what Chris Roberts should have done, just stopped putting out stretch goals, taken the money they had and crafted a really solid, tight and focused single player experience. But again, Roberts doesn't know how to deal with the management of business side of making games, and thus saw this as the chance to realise his dream of a perfect, impossibly giant supergame which people could retreat into and never again have to face the harsh realities of real life, and a lot of overly credulous, short-sighted fans seem to have totally bought into that dream, which is an unworkable dream which will never really happen.
We could have had an awesome spaceship game. We're not going to get one. That's why this whole episode makes me angry.
