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Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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10 years of development for this part of SC, correct? If so, that's very little to show for it.
No, 10 years since the announcement of their intent to build the game. Then they had to build the company, the engine, and they are building 2 games at once (SQ42 and StarCitizen).
Developing a AAA single player game + an MMO at the same time, with the components working across the 2, and now being at the point where they are feature complete on SQ42, is pretty impressive.
It’s going to get ugly when the chickens come home to roost on this one. They are slowly marching towards $1 billion. They are over $600mill already. And people still donate. It’s baffling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop
Currently Star Citizen is at the #1 spot for the most money spent on a video game's development on this list. And that's including adjustment for inflation.
I can't believe Shadow of the Tomb Raider was that expensive, it's such a forgettable game.
It's even worse if you look further down on the other unofficial figures list at Marvel's Avengers. It nearly costed as much as Red Dead Redemption 2 (also unofficial numbers). My assumption is, that the license is in these costs included and why it balooned it.
I still kind of doubt it’s going anywhere fast. Because a game with this scope has already signed up for some pretty massive post-launch support. Let’s be generous and say it takes them another 2-3 years to develop this single player and another 5-6 to finish star citizen. That’s very generous.
They started pre-production in 2010. So it’s already been 13 years of development with near unlimited money on SC. So again, add 5 years till a mainstream launch and another 3-5 years of active support and you’ll be well over two decades deep in a single games development. That’s half of someone’s career to develop one game. Now we add another game on top of this.
The other game is admittedly much easier to develop but still it will take massive amounts of support. If Bethesda can’t do it well, why does anyone think this dev can and in such good time? I have my doubts.
They didn't start pre-production in 2010, that's when they started building the Kickstarter video, unless you're counting the broad story strokes in CR's head as "pre-production", in which case Starfield was in pre-production for 25+ years. :P
Development on SQ42 started in 2013, and 10 years to not only build a game, but the engine tech and the studios as well, is not at all crazy given the game. Major games like RDR2 and GTAV take 8+ years, and they are working with already-established teams, and not doing anything crazy tech-wise.
And yes, MMOs have extremely long lives, both pre- and post-release. Eve is over 20 now. WoW is who knows how old. Maple Story devs have literally had kids and watched them go off to college.
I won’t tell people what to do with their money, but it’s clear people have bought in to both of these games existing. And if it were my money, I’d want to believe in these devs. But for the rest of us, these games need to materialize as functional and fully featured releases for us to care.
And I don’t think the timeline is crazy so far with their development. What’s wild to me is thinking that a newly founded studio, even a well funded one, can knock out a competent single player and MMO with these scopes. It’s slim chances from an outsiders perspective.
Take a look at what mature and well funded studios are putting out in 2023. The likes of Starfield are actually some of the better cases. I know the incentives are different, but still. So I’m expecting a lot of tooling to need to be done for both these games to exist and exist at an enjoyable playability by the end of the 20s.
Anyways, im not trying to kill enthusiasm for people who enjoy interest in the project but to everyone outside of that, this isn’t reassuring. All large scope games should be considered to be nonexistent until they hit reviewers hands at this point.
You are basically throwing out the existence of bad AAA games to discredit the idea that people can pull off AAA games. Here's a secret; in software development, money and experience cannot overcome bad management. Lots of publisher-driven games release as crap because the publishers have them pegged to a certain financial quarter they want to show a revenue pull in, irregardless of where the game is at.
I think it's fair to hold early access games with skepticism, but plenty of people do play early access games (and SC).
But also, CitCon is first and foremost an event for current players, not a marketing one for new players. It's a bunch of dev panels on nitty-gritty details of things like UI design, flight model physics changes, npc AI design, backend economy simulations, sound and lighting, etc. The SQ42 video was them throwing current players a live-view bone about the state of SQ42 development, rather than just the usual Jira-derived sprint status reports and development milestone updates that we get every 2 weeks.
This is just cynicism about publisher-driven game-dev. It may be justified for those, but SC is not one of those, it's quite literally an "indie" (publisher-independent) game. Plenty of independent game developers create "large-scope" games (Grim Dawn, Kenshi, Rimworld, Project Zomboid, etc) that have scope and depth (e.g. in number and complexity of mechanics) comparable to what AAA games do.
If people had not been actually playing SC (since what, 2016 for PU release iirc?) then I'd understand the idea of its potential "non-existence", but it's hard for me to take that stance seriously when it's sitting on my harddrive right now.
Last night I did 2 'bunker missions' (infiltrate facility, kill bad guys, loot), and salvaged 3 derelict ships. Night before that I was doing bounties on NPCs and running bomber support for some guys who had gotten pinned down by another group of players at a planet-side wreck site (Ghost Hollow). I don't do mining, or cargo hauling, or drug running, or ship or ground pvp, or player-rescue medical missions, or racing, or investigations, but those are also in there.
I swear sometimes it's like the people who talk about SC 'not releasing' seem to have no clue about what has literally already been released.
A lot of people tend to forget, comparing SC's timeline of development to other AAA games doesn't work when those games are pushed out early, rushed to the finish line by publishers who don't care about polish, only sales numbers, and are fine with compromise at every level.
Chris Roberts doesn't do compromise. Every system in SC is created for hyper realism, down to working hydraulics and gears for the moving parts of ships. He wants everything to be perfect, and he'll call it done when he's happy with it.
And like you said, it's technically playable right now. I've never before been part of an alpha development, able to make posts about bugs that actually get read, commented on, and fixed by the dev team. Most game "betas" are just a 3 day early-access where nothing will actually change.
The game is hyped up so much because we see the potential, enjoy playing what we can, and love having a say in it's development.
The tech debt they have and will incur alone will be a huge mountain to climb. You can't develop a game for that long without having to go back and completely rebuild things with newer tools.
Even their rewards show their age now. CD and DVD collections and such. What's going to happen when it comes time to fulfill all those merch order for backers in 2028 or whenever? What happens when virtually no one uses disc media anymore and they are struggling to even burn all this stuff?
This is my main concern about the game. With tech that moves this quickly, you have to understand that game companies who are established are living on the very edge of that debt.
Like starfield for example. Who knows how old it’s code is from the start of its development. It’s why Bethesda games break frequently and crash often. When you develop games on a 8-10 year cycle, think of how many hardware generations that is. 3 to 4 right? So when you’re talking about building an engine, then running it and building a game, then supporting it, all over the coarse of 15-20 years of coding? It’s a giant mess to program and there’s no way in hell it can be optimized properly.
Not to mention the massive task of upgrading the game as new hardware and new engine features arrive.
googles
Five years ago, this guy tried suing to get his money back when the thing was a third the size it currently is.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne5n7b/star-citizen-court-documents-reveal-the-messy-reality-of-crowdfunding-a-dollar200-million-game
So if they still are on the hook to provide all that stuff and many people are in a similar situation to this guy, that's a lot of merch that they gotta produce after they have done the game.
This is what bugs me the most about this whole fiasco. I paid into the original Kickstarter because Wing Commander through Freelancer were my favorite games and I wanted more of that.
The current project, even if we were to VERY charitably call it a game and call it playable, is nothing like Wing Commander or Freelancer.
If they were still making an actual Wing Commander type game after all this time, my copium might still be in full effect. But this current... THING... isn't even the game they promised in the first place. It's so disappointing.
I didn't quote that bit, but that's actually what he was upset about too.
I didn't really enjoy it, but did you play Elite: Dangerous?
And I guess that there's the X series, X4 now, though the focus isn't really dogfighting.
Everspace 2? I disliked one of those, can't remember if that was it, but it is fighter-ish space combat.
There are also atmospheric fighter combat games.
I played Elite for a little bit, maybe a month or two, before it got to the point where it just felt like a job.
I love the X series. I have hundreds of hours in X4. It's definitely my favorite of the bunch.
Everspace 2 was fun, but never hoked me for some reason.
The most "Wing Commander" game in recent memory was Star Wars: Squadrons, IMHO. Shame they decided to make it CoD in space though... I'm not big on the multplayer aspect and the single player campaign was super short.
Starfield was a huge disappointment. etc etc
I believe they said the last expansion for X4 was the last one. Here's hoping there's an X5 coming.
Yeah, it never really clicked for me, and I didn't like the "faux online" aspect either. I bet that it's probably pretty in VR, though.
Ah, okay, I didn't think that that'd be your cup of tea, because while the game does have fighters, it tends to favor large ship combat, and my take is that the dogfighting isn't too elaborate -- like, if you can leverage strafing in X2, the enemy AI isn't all that great at predicting where you'll be. There isn't, I don't know, breaking missile locks or whatever. Though I guess that exploiting dead zones in fields of fire is a thing. And there's a management focus, and the ability to indirectly manage many ships. I hadn't played much of X4 myself, though I did do X3 a fair bit.
Do you enjoy the fleet command aspect of it? There's a game that I recall that felt more like a fleet naval combat simulator in space, not on the first-person dogfighting aspect. Lots of naval warfare-ish jargon, focus on sensor and counter-sensor stuff -- I suspect that people who like something leaning a bit more milsim would like that. It was early access when I played it, but probably enough to have some fun with it. Let me find the name.
googles
Got it. NEBULOUS: Fleet Command.
They flash through a lot of functionality in a few seconds quickly in the demo vids there on steam, but you can see the ship and weapon configuration, fleet and ship commands, system-specific damage control, some of the electronic warfare stuff, things like that.
So, I enjoyed what was there, but I can imagine someone finding the faux-naval jargon a bit opaque. Sort of like operating a naval group, with ships with specialized roles. The graphics are okay, but beauty isn't their goal -- they're trying to do a combat environment in space.
I actually ran across it when looking for a non-space milsim fleet naval combat game, and was pleasantly-surprised.
Yeah, ditto.
I liked it, but then I wanted a Skyrim or Fallout 4 out of it, not a space combat game. Yeah, the space combat there isn't much more than a pretty minigame.
Sorry to bear the bad news, but Elite: Dangerous has abandoned developing any further VR functionality.
To my knowledge VR still works in ship cockpits and is still amazing there, but the last big expansion's big draw added new on foot content that doesn't support VR at all. In VR it displays in headset as a giant 2D screen in front of you, if it chooses to work with the headset at all.
Well to be fair, X4 isn't my favorite of the bunch because of its (lack of) similarity to Wing Commander. It's not really that kind of game. But it is fun and scratches the space economy itch more like a Freelancer or Eve.
I hadn't hard of Nebulous. I see what they're going for graphically (Homeworld style). I'll have to keep an eye on it. But yeah the fleet combat part of X4 never quite got me interested beyond "if I make 100 fighters, I should be able to take out pretty much anything". Controlling large fleets was always a weakness of the game, one of the janky bits. But Building stations, setting up an economy, piracy, and all that stuff is still fun.
Ah, gotcha, fair-enough.
Ah, okay. I was just trying to figure out how it differed from some of the other things you listed, and fleet combat was one. But the economic side is another, and, yeah, I can see the economic side of the X series being appealing if building a big space empire is a goal.
If you're looking for a space economic sim, that's entirely-absent from NEBULOUS, and in fact they even mention that up-front on the product page -- they're going for combat simulation. So it won't fill that slot.
Yeah, probably not my cuppa tea, but I will keep an eye on it. Space ships blowing each other up has potential, even if it's not my favorite style of said activity.
And I bet it releases before Star Citizen for a fraction of the price!