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Star Citizen News - With the long awaited v3.0 update to Star Citizen still undated, players have been expressing concern over the delay. The update was first planned for late 2016, but with the fast approach of late 2017, there is no deployment in site. A new post on the "Spectrum" from Will Leverett addresses player concerns, most notably by saying that the production schedule was made as a framework, not as something set in stone.
Comments
I don't believe in "due to the complexity of what we’re building". I mean, if they keep going on with this in mind , they will never release the game.
The time will come when backers will no longer support the game and .. they will have 2 options.
1) To workout faster and release the game ( bugged , incomplete, etc)
2) Come out and say "Well.. thanks for your support guys! We tried. Bye"
I kinda put my bet on #2.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
Maybe someone needs to take a realistic look and tell everyone what they can deliver instead of clinging to broken promises.
No signature, I don't have a pen
The problem is really they tie the release date estimate so tight with the estimates of all the ongoing tasks, so put some bugs in there and it will be enough to force them to push back the release; no buffer and no maneuverability just make it worse...
Without considering or even trying to speculate a buffer to tackle in bugs and other issues that arise, it really makes having estimates at all pointless, I think they should have one approach where the progress reported in schedule shouldn't be based on how close the release estimate is.
CIG needs to listen to Scotty's advice:
We talk about the biggest update yet that brings in large amount of tech that touches up to the core of the game... one the hardest parts in dev is getting core pieces of tech merged together, the biggest challenge will make it work well together, the number of bugs and other issues that arise during that process will be a daunting task, but there's no other option but to keep pushing forward.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
What I do worry is that in several years time, the systems and assets that are in the game won't be on par with other games releasing. When I pledged nearly 4 years ago, it was graphically well ahead of everything else. Today, it is kind of on par with other releases in my opinion. How will it look in 4 years time? They will have to start upgrading and overhauling assets, which will result in even more delays.
I understand development is always about chasing a moving target. In this case though, the delays may have nudged the target a bit too far.
No matter how many disclaimers are there that state the likeness and frequency of schedule delays, and so forfh, the public perception will take those dates more seriously than CIG does.
If there's reason why companies never share internal schedules, this is exactly why; it's not meant for public consumption.
From what I have seen so far, they have yet to actually hit any target dates that they themselves have set.
Actually, that is not true, they always hit the target date for Ship Sales.
Go figure.
A creative person is motivated by the desire to achieve, not the desire to beat others.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
There's no gamer who wouldn't like to see an awesome game come out of all of this. The issue is there's way too many red flags and goal post moving for reasonable folks to not be skeptical. Not when we've seen so many other developers go in the same dreamer ambition route and epic fail.
As much money that is involved in this project, it WILL eventually run out. That's when you will see the true nature of the developer/publisher.
The final thing I always wonder, with all these cutting edge features; Let's say it all gets completed, what rig is this thing supposed to run on? They couldn't even keep a steady frame rate in their own demos/showcases that I saw.
How Sway!
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes and no. It's true that people should expect these early deadlines to change because of the history of so many developers, CIG especially.
However, anyone with any professional experience knows caveats and disclaimers don't matter. When you provide a date to a project manager, it doesn't matter how many disclaimers you add to that date; that date is what is passed along to executives and investors. And that date is what is discussed in their respective meetings and conference calls. When that date is missed or pushed back; the disclaimers that went along with it are long forgotten. This is the way the world works.
The reason I won't touch this game until well after release is because CIG clearly lacks both discipline and experience with a project this large. This is not to say the game will suck, that's yet to be seen. What I'm saying is they will eventually release this game on the general public, and my guess is it will be a steaming hot mess for weeks if not months.
So not at all about new features, when you see the stuff added to the schedule it's mostly departments that will be able to finish new things in time for the milestone side of what's pushing it back.
The performance in terms of hardware should be around the same, they did graphical upgrades here and there but shouldn't be the deal breaker.
I think what deal breaker will be CPU, a game that does this much simulation, especially the physics, rooms, etc.. without a good CPU it would bottleneck it.
People always complain of frames in simulation games because the GPU won't do miracles when the game uses more processing.
That said, I think wait and see is the best thing to do and not to really commit fully to the game until sometime during beta. It's really too early to tell how the finished game will play at this point.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
But it's really what I was talking about Disco yesterday and were trying to get this message across, improving the communication. If it was me I would just report the progress in every task weekly as it is, but only share the testing and live estimate releases once there's a solid date to give, and let the perception of the completion of the update be driven from how many things are completed, left and their status, and not from how close one estimated release date is.
Disco's argument was "we're damned if they do and damned if we don't"; but there's a growing number of people asking them to stop sharing internals and give dates with a speculative buffer that takes into account the problems they might (and will) face in the way; and that is indeed what Scotty's advice is about. Reality be like...
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
..and I don't buy whatever you wrote up above. What I said stands because they said the 3.0 version from last year, is a lot different then today 3.0 because they "learned things". Well, why don't they spend another year and in 2018 they will come and say : 3.0 ( insert any version you want actually ) of 2017 is a lot different then 3.0 from 2018 .
Point is, technology evolves and we learn every day about different things . So they will always erase and build from scratch and if they will keep going like this, in the end, there will be no SC. Just..Alpha Version(s) of the game, which .. is very pathetic with their budged.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
This is the problem, right here. It's not "deadlines" or promises, for that matter, it's ESTIMATES. As long as people talk about estimates as something else than what it is, they will expect delivery on said dates.
Viking
That was how the game was years ago graphically, there has been one MASSIVE jump to bring it to current standards, in many aspects over just graphics.
In terms of looks, it's not that hard to catch up, their assets are already created extremely detailed if anything we should see improvements on lighting, VFX, AA, side of the DX12/Vulkan they are to upgrade towards.
The technology is simply the biggest and longest part of what they do here, they are not taking this long creating a profession, or new areas and content, it's the back-end of what is set to be one MMO, and that is what 3.0 is big on, from creating the backends to support the economy and trading, and one solar system, to making the gameplay persistent as it should be in one MMO.
Then we get to the core of the argument, should they rush it or should they delay it? There's a high expectation lying surrounding it and I think they realize they need to release something decently stable and impressive with it. I'd say they feel the pressure on both fronts "Hurry up but don't rush it!".
When a contractor gives me an ESTIMATE on a price for work to be done, I expect that estimate to be the price for the work, and I'm pretty flippin' disappointed when that estimate is exceeded.
EDIT: My point is we all know what words mean. Attempts to redefine words specifically for a few game developers doesn't change what those words actually mean.
However, I agree CIG needs to change how they present estimates to consider all factors over just "code-complete", this is the issue:
And bam, one complex bug was all it took to 3.0 release to be delayed.
That's how solid that release estimate is.