They plan to have a complete Sims-like ecology of NPCs, and players will fit into that.
What is the time frame here? Decades? I mean seriously, why is anyone believing this?
Actually, I think there’s a 50/50 chance SC becomes one of the first permanent 24/7 habitable VR universes. Where people live and work full time. A full economy, elections, etc.
Obviously that’s decades away, but who else is building anything equivalent? Facebook is taking the approach of giving us mini VR apps, and hoping a universe will evolve from that. Cloud Imperium is taking the opposite direction, building a “Sim Universe” first and adding “apps” as needed.
I’m not sure which is the better approach... which is harder, building a fully fleshed out simulated universe or building out the killer apps of VR interaction?
Actually I think they’re probably about equally hard, and each side will just copy what the other did to complete the picture. But CI and FB are both well positioned to capture a slice of the fulltime VR market when it emerges in the late 2020s.
> I’m not sure which is the better approach...
Really? How about a stable foundation for something like a permanent universe? How about a management that is capable and how about a serious, viable business model?
Instead the business model is the worse of the new lootbox-generation of games, the management is a highly questionable dictator with a terrible history of managing teams and his wife. The foundation never was properly stable for anything of the scale it is in now. Not even speaking about a functioning MMO. And of course there is no native support for VR there...it may come...like female characters...
I mean man, come on... The visions some people have of this game are so far away from justified, it has all the signs of a unhealthy cult.
FYI: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAo...
The rest will keep on laughing...
Edit: regarding delusional artists https://wccftech.com/roberts-squadron-42-above-god-of-war/
The only time there was talk about user-generated content was when they had a "design a ship"-contest. Designer teams jumped on it, designed a ship that you could visit in the hangar instance but it's gone now...because they needed to rework things there. I wonder what because that ship was never playable....This is SC for you.
Wow, the timeline is an horror story.
I don't understand the appeal of space opera games like this. They will mostly be empty zones of players.
I also have ideas to make an ambitious video game, with persistence and an open world. But I would rather start small and humble by releasing something that is playable, add cool features as the development progresses, but still providing basic features and playability at first, that would be slowly replaced by the more advanced features of the game. Making a game attractive quickly from the beginning is important, especially if you're using the crowdfunding model. Today it's possible to have a continuous evolution of a game, to constantly change and improve it.
The hardest will always be to track player locations in realtime, on a large world, while keeping the game smooth enough. Once that is done, the sky is the limit. I don't understand why so many games focus on the content (because that can be an real time and money sink), while the only things that are attractive for such games are the gameplay and the multiplayer.