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I've been very interested in following the divergant paths of Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous which are similar projects which started at roughly the same time

I've been very interested in following the divergant paths of Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous which are similar projects which started at roughly the same time (both kickstarted in 2012) E:D seem to have taken the route of getting an MVP out and functional and have been iterating on that base since then adding new content, play modes, platforms etc. As a result they had a playable game out in 2014. SC seems to have gone more for a big bang approach of only launching once they've got more in place with, from the blog post, an alpha in 2020.

theandrewbailey 8y ago
SC is already in playable alpha, and has been for years. It's Squadron 42 (the single player mode) that's planned for 2020.
- raesene9 8y ago
  yep but unless I'm misreading the original kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen promised the single player mode in 2014
  - theandrewbailey 8y ago
    That was before the funding took off, and Roberts decided to scale it up in response. Edit: The page reads "estimated". "Estimated" isn't "promised".
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    We have quite different interpretations of the word "promise". For the sake of your real-world relationships, maybe don't throw that word around so easily, at least without someone actually using that word in the first place.
- libraryatnight 8y ago
  I've watched people play the alpha on streams and jesus it looks boring and terrible.
- sroya 8y ago
  It’s not playable, it’s a buggy mess. A $200 million buggy mess. CIG has never made a single deadline it’s set for itself.
  - LastMuel 8y ago
    It appears that you're posting an opinion rather than informed fact. You should attempt following the development if you have a keen interest. They've switched to a quarterly release system and have, in fact, just released their Q4 drop last evening. I would grant you that they have had a history of missing deadlines, but stating that they have "never made a single deadline" is disingenuous at best.
    - swampthinker 8y ago
      Is the frame rate still limited by the server-side tickrate?
      - jdlshore 8y ago
        No, and it never was. The frame rate was limited by a large in-memory working set, high CPU load from tracking too many entities, and lack of multi-threading. Those issues were fixed in the 3.3 release earlier this year.
        Laforet 8y ago
        I'm not too worried about bugs TBH as long as the underlying game.mechanism is sound. For example, Subnautica have had severe FPS issues from the beginning yet it never became a gamebreaking issue. Last time I looked into SC (a few months ago), the only gameplay loop consisted of picking up cargo and dropping it off with no failure conditions attached. What else has been added since?
        fapjacks 8y ago
        I guess you're using a different definition of gameplay here? You can fight other players, race, FPS, and more, and this has been available for a lot longer than a few months, unless you're also using a different definition of what constitutes a few months: http://www.infoapps.cc/en/starcitizen_playable.html http://www.infoapps.cc/en/starcitizen_playable.html
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
This is only partially accurate. Elite: Dangerous definitely focused on getting that "release" 1.0 version ASAP. But Star Citizen has been playable for years as well, it just doesn't presume to call itself "done". Star Citizen is currently on version 3.3.7, and a decent amount of playable features have been around a long time. They're not that dissimilar, just the labels of what they've chosen to state of their status. Elite: Dangerous added planetary landing more or less around the same time Star Citizen did, for instance, but E:D called it an expansion and Star Citizen called it a new version for their alpha. Also, you are confused Squadron 42, a single-player game, which has an alpha in 2020, and Star Citizen, which is more analogous to Elite: Dangerous, which is ongoingly available.
- raesene9 8y ago
  didn't the original Star Citizen kickstarter promise the single player mode for delivery in 2014? It definitely seems that way from reading the page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    Again with your "promise" claim, which is false!
    - wapoamspomw 8y ago
      After they got funding they promised, repeatedly, that it would be out in 2016. https://www.pcgamer.com/roberts-space-industries-denies-squadron-42-delay-report/ https://www.pcgamer.com/roberts-space-industries-denies-squa... "Squadron 42, the single-player portion of Star Citizen, doesn't have a hard release date, but it was expected to be ready sometime this year. There's even a little “2016” over the “Answer the Call” logo on the Squadron 42 web page. However, that came into question when German site Gamestar reported that, in an interview at PAX West, Cloud Imperium Games boss Chris Roberts said the game probably wouldn't be out until mid-to-late 2017." A fun reddit thread from Jan 2016: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/40fsop/do_you_really_believe_sq42_will_be_released_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/40fsop/do_you_...
jdlshore 8y ago
I agree. E:D is a classic example of an iterative MVP. It's been criticized as being "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle." People have also complained about subsequent for-pay expansions being "money grabs," and "why don't they finish the game before asking me to shell out more money." Star Citizen took a more traditional "big-bang release" approach, complete with the (also traditional) wildly incorrect release predictions. Its funding model is based on selling spaceships, particularly concept sales for ships that aren't available in game yet, which has been criticized for "selling jpegs" and "pay-to-win." Braben and Roberts' games were both very famous in their day. They're theoretically equally capable of generating a fervent following. It's interesting to see such diametrically opposed approaches. It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. Despite the complaints about SC's funding model, it's been amazingly consistent at bringing in about $34 million in pledges a year. [1] (The real moral of the story: people on the Internet, and particularly gamers, will complain about everything. But those complaints aren't necessarily correlated with success.) [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD...
- pdpi 8y ago
  > It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.
  - railerrudder 8y ago
    Yeah, exactly that.
- f4stjack 8y ago
  To be honest as a person who played Elite and Elite 2 ( Frontier I think was its full name) extensively in my childhood and adolescent years they were always "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle". And speaking of Elite 2, it wasn't kidding. I still marvel at how 500kb of a game (I distinctly remember it was only a single disk and a disk to hold save files) contained entire galaxies and planets not only you can land but traverse with your ship. Sure they were procgen but still it was really breathtaking to see all those vistas I would never see - barring a wormhole They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim. Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still. Thanks for reading.
ryandrake 8y ago
At the risk of over-simplifying, it just seems like SC needed/needs a good project manager or producer, someone who is solely focused on shipping something. So many software projects end up in this perpetual alpha state because nobody has an actual step-by-step plan to ship it and is cracking the whip on it. Bias: I’m a project manager :-)
- clavalle 8y ago
  SC's had exactly that...they just don't last long.
- everyone 8y ago
  I always got the impression they needed a lead programmer.. After Roberts initial crowdfunding round (based on the visual demo he made in Cryengine with contractor art assets) The 1st thing he should have done is hire one really good programmer who could have planned out how to make this, what engine / technology stack to use.. The core architecture for its main features, and then slowly build up a team to work towards that plan. Instead he just seems to go on a mad hiring spree of artists, throwing more and more complete AAA assets on top of the POS visual demo he had made in Cryengine.. What boggles my mind is that it seems they never veered from this strategy, 100's of millions of dollars and 8+ years later, and it appears they are still throwing stuff willy nilly onto that original dumpster fire. Seems like one of the best examples of the sunken cost fallacy in action that Ive ever seen.
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    I have been following development pretty closely on YouTube, although I'm not a backer. I don't think you're right. To me the cycle looks something like: 1) Hack together assets as close to AAA as they can get, on top of a POS tech demo. Enough to show to people and get sales (this is a very Hacker News startup-y technique) 2) Pick one part of the system that "needs to work" by release, hire a few good coders and have them actually write a proper software subsystem 3) Hack together another POS tech demo, with the proper subsystem in place 4) Redo all of the assets that have already been done to use that new subsystem They've gone through this several times with many many subsystems. It's not clear to me this will ever crystalize into a system that has a certain quality bar it hits across the board. So in that sense you might be right that they should've taken a more top-down high falootin' architecture approach from the beginning. But that's speculation too. Design is hard, and you generally have to try stuff in order to figure out a large system. Some degree of iteration is necessary. At a certain size waterfall just won't work. But for sure your characterization of "he's just throwing artists at cryengine" is not correct.
mesozoic 8y ago
Apparently SC realized they can make a lot more money if they never actually released a game. I guess they're big fans of "The Producers".
- giobox 8y ago
  Haha, I’ve never considered the similarities between “The Producers” and Star Citizen before, but it’s worthwhile to think about. Actually shipping a finished product would turn off the donation stream...

theandrewbailey 8y ago

SC is already in playable alpha, and has been for years. It's Squadron 42 (the single player mode) that's planned for 2020.

raesene9 8y ago
yep but unless I'm misreading the original kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen promised the single player mode in 2014
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  That was before the funding took off, and Roberts decided to scale it up in response. Edit: The page reads "estimated". "Estimated" isn't "promised".
- fapjacks 8y ago
  We have quite different interpretations of the word "promise". For the sake of your real-world relationships, maybe don't throw that word around so easily, at least without someone actually using that word in the first place.
libraryatnight 8y ago
I've watched people play the alpha on streams and jesus it looks boring and terrible.
sroya 8y ago
It’s not playable, it’s a buggy mess. A $200 million buggy mess. CIG has never made a single deadline it’s set for itself.
- LastMuel 8y ago
  It appears that you're posting an opinion rather than informed fact. You should attempt following the development if you have a keen interest. They've switched to a quarterly release system and have, in fact, just released their Q4 drop last evening. I would grant you that they have had a history of missing deadlines, but stating that they have "never made a single deadline" is disingenuous at best.
  - swampthinker 8y ago
    Is the frame rate still limited by the server-side tickrate?
    - jdlshore 8y ago
      No, and it never was. The frame rate was limited by a large in-memory working set, high CPU load from tracking too many entities, and lack of multi-threading. Those issues were fixed in the 3.3 release earlier this year.
      - Laforet 8y ago
        I'm not too worried about bugs TBH as long as the underlying game.mechanism is sound. For example, Subnautica have had severe FPS issues from the beginning yet it never became a gamebreaking issue. Last time I looked into SC (a few months ago), the only gameplay loop consisted of picking up cargo and dropping it off with no failure conditions attached. What else has been added since?
        fapjacks 8y ago
        I guess you're using a different definition of gameplay here? You can fight other players, race, FPS, and more, and this has been available for a lot longer than a few months, unless you're also using a different definition of what constitutes a few months: http://www.infoapps.cc/en/starcitizen_playable.html http://www.infoapps.cc/en/starcitizen_playable.html

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

This is only partially accurate. Elite: Dangerous definitely focused on getting that "release" 1.0 version ASAP. But Star Citizen has been playable for years as well, it just doesn't presume to call itself "done". Star Citizen is currently on version 3.3.7, and a decent amount of playable features have been around a long time. They're not that dissimilar, just the labels of what they've chosen to state of their status. Elite: Dangerous added planetary landing more or less around the same time Star Citizen did, for instance, but E:D called it an expansion and Star Citizen called it a new version for their alpha. Also, you are confused Squadron 42, a single-player game, which has an alpha in 2020, and Star Citizen, which is more analogous to Elite: Dangerous, which is ongoingly available.

raesene9 8y ago
didn't the original Star Citizen kickstarter promise the single player mode for delivery in 2014? It definitely seems that way from reading the page at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen
- fapjacks 8y ago
  Again with your "promise" claim, which is false!
  - wapoamspomw 8y ago
    After they got funding they promised, repeatedly, that it would be out in 2016. https://www.pcgamer.com/roberts-space-industries-denies-squadron-42-delay-report/ https://www.pcgamer.com/roberts-space-industries-denies-squa... "Squadron 42, the single-player portion of Star Citizen, doesn't have a hard release date, but it was expected to be ready sometime this year. There's even a little “2016” over the “Answer the Call” logo on the Squadron 42 web page. However, that came into question when German site Gamestar reported that, in an interview at PAX West, Cloud Imperium Games boss Chris Roberts said the game probably wouldn't be out until mid-to-late 2017." A fun reddit thread from Jan 2016: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/40fsop/do_you_really_believe_sq42_will_be_released_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/40fsop/do_you_...

jdlshore 8y ago

I agree. E:D is a classic example of an iterative MVP. It's been criticized as being "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle." People have also complained about subsequent for-pay expansions being "money grabs," and "why don't they finish the game before asking me to shell out more money." Star Citizen took a more traditional "big-bang release" approach, complete with the (also traditional) wildly incorrect release predictions. Its funding model is based on selling spaceships, particularly concept sales for ships that aren't available in game yet, which has been criticized for "selling jpegs" and "pay-to-win." Braben and Roberts' games were both very famous in their day. They're theoretically equally capable of generating a fervent following. It's interesting to see such diametrically opposed approaches. It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. Despite the complaints about SC's funding model, it's been amazingly consistent at bringing in about $34 million in pledges a year. [1] (The real moral of the story: people on the Internet, and particularly gamers, will complain about everything. But those complaints aren't necessarily correlated with success.) [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD...

pdpi 8y ago
> It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.
- railerrudder 8y ago
  Yeah, exactly that.
f4stjack 8y ago
To be honest as a person who played Elite and Elite 2 ( Frontier I think was its full name) extensively in my childhood and adolescent years they were always "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle". And speaking of Elite 2, it wasn't kidding. I still marvel at how 500kb of a game (I distinctly remember it was only a single disk and a disk to hold save files) contained entire galaxies and planets not only you can land but traverse with your ship. Sure they were procgen but still it was really breathtaking to see all those vistas I would never see - barring a wormhole They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim. Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still. Thanks for reading.

ryandrake 8y ago

At the risk of over-simplifying, it just seems like SC needed/needs a good project manager or producer, someone who is solely focused on shipping something. So many software projects end up in this perpetual alpha state because nobody has an actual step-by-step plan to ship it and is cracking the whip on it. Bias: I’m a project manager :-)

clavalle 8y ago
SC's had exactly that...they just don't last long.
everyone 8y ago
I always got the impression they needed a lead programmer.. After Roberts initial crowdfunding round (based on the visual demo he made in Cryengine with contractor art assets) The 1st thing he should have done is hire one really good programmer who could have planned out how to make this, what engine / technology stack to use.. The core architecture for its main features, and then slowly build up a team to work towards that plan. Instead he just seems to go on a mad hiring spree of artists, throwing more and more complete AAA assets on top of the POS visual demo he had made in Cryengine.. What boggles my mind is that it seems they never veered from this strategy, 100's of millions of dollars and 8+ years later, and it appears they are still throwing stuff willy nilly onto that original dumpster fire. Seems like one of the best examples of the sunken cost fallacy in action that Ive ever seen.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I have been following development pretty closely on YouTube, although I'm not a backer. I don't think you're right. To me the cycle looks something like: 1) Hack together assets as close to AAA as they can get, on top of a POS tech demo. Enough to show to people and get sales (this is a very Hacker News startup-y technique) 2) Pick one part of the system that "needs to work" by release, hire a few good coders and have them actually write a proper software subsystem 3) Hack together another POS tech demo, with the proper subsystem in place 4) Redo all of the assets that have already been done to use that new subsystem They've gone through this several times with many many subsystems. It's not clear to me this will ever crystalize into a system that has a certain quality bar it hits across the board. So in that sense you might be right that they should've taken a more top-down high falootin' architecture approach from the beginning. But that's speculation too. Design is hard, and you generally have to try stuff in order to figure out a large system. Some degree of iteration is necessary. At a certain size waterfall just won't work. But for sure your characterization of "he's just throwing artists at cryengine" is not correct.

mesozoic 8y ago

Apparently SC realized they can make a lot more money if they never actually released a game. I guess they're big fans of "The Producers".

giobox 8y ago
Haha, I’ve never considered the similarities between “The Producers” and Star Citizen before, but it’s worthwhile to think about. Actually shipping a finished product would turn off the donation stream...