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-AKScI3S3VjrD...
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.
Why do you think depth is not a requirement for this self story telling game? Isn't it getting boring quickly?
From my experience with Oolite, a FOSS, modable Elite clone, providing a bunch of career choices (trader, pirate, bounty hunter) and NPCs that react to who you choose to be (e.g. bounty hunters will go after you if you choose to be a pirate) is a good start. Affordances for goal setting can be as simple as the traditional character/ship equipment upgrade ladder.
Oolite players tend to stick to the "non player centered universe" paradigm; that is the player is not a hero or destined to save the universe even though it is a single-player game. When a mod provides a new weapon or upgrade, it is considered better if the NPCs can use them too. They removed the Energy bomb that was present in Elite, an obvious player-only weapon.
In my experience, when the game doesn't make distinctions between NPCs and the player, your player instincts tell you to become stronger than NPCs.
A corollary of the non player-centered game paradigm is that the beginning of the game can be rough for the player. Typically in Oolite with the standard startup, the players spend their first couple hours staying away from any other ship and fleeing pirates because they cannot really fight back without a decent equipment.
One could name that a "difficulty inversion": a game that is difficult at first, then get easier as the player acquires better gears. Oolite has this problem. I was trying to make a set of mods to fix it before my interest shifted to another game. Not that I got bored of Oolite, it's just that I've found something even more interesting to work on, and sometimes I have an Oolite itch, because solving similar issues but in a full sandbox multiplayer game is even more difficult.
The endgame can be a problem too, because eventually players can afford the best gear and one-shot most things. My take on this is to use the "high-score" game approach, that is making it more and more difficult to survive (really just like Tetris). More specifically, in Elite/Oolite there's a mysterious and hostile alien race than can be used to create an unstoppable invasion force scenario. This approach both helps with increasing the difficulty proportionally to the wealth of the player, and provides a story-telling affordance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance - my spellchecker doesn't know that word so I guess it's not common?
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.
You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.
And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.
So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.
All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.
Bias: I’m a project manager :-)
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.
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.
I can sum up my point very quickly.. They used CryEngine.. Maybe the worst possible choice imaginable for this kind of game. They needed someone early on to choose not Cryengine, to choose some tech-stack that they wouldnt be fighting a constant losing battle against.
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.
Those issues were fixed in the 3.3 release earlier this year.
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?
Edit: The page reads "estimated". "Estimated" isn't "promised".
Actually shipping a finished product would turn off the donation stream...
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.
Elite: Dangerous had their alpha in 2013, playable beta mid-2014, with a 1.0 release end of 2014 that was a complete game.
Star citizen had a very scaled down version (Crusader) available end of 2015, as what amounts to an alpha.
I personally hope Star Citizen delivers, but there is really no equivalence here. Frontier delivered much faster.
What we are discussing has never been delivered before which might explain some of the perceived delays.
Whether or not you liked E:D, it's still a fully released game that felt polished, albeit shallow.
But that's besides the point. Parent poster was drawing equivalencies between the two games' release timings, and my point is those equivalencies aren't actually comparable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_First_Encounters
I don't see how E:D is inferior to it, but YMMV.
Don't get me wrong, their development cycle is fine if they can keep with it and releasing content is awesome from them. However, I wouldn't recommend anyone that isn't a Space Citizen enthusiast to get their hands on Squadron 42.
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_...
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.