The FPS combat is only going to be a small fraction of the gameplay. It's mostly going to be important for ship boarding and the boarding of derelicts. No planetside ground warzones on release. Otherwise you'll probably never even use the FPS game mechanics. The social module was to get aspects of the netcode ironed out, produce a map with reusable assets (like dumpers depot), implement transitions and implement the UI and method for interacting (which is essentially an AR like display).
As a man who saw Chris Roberts name and sunk $235 in this thing, I really hope it turns out to be more than vaporware. What we've seen looks encouraging, but perhaps they've bitten off more than they can actually chew. *goes back to playing Elite Dangerous*
Damn.. if even half of it is true It fuels the opinion i already had but it's much worse apparently than i believed. It's a shame because what i saw was just beautiful to look at but that seems to be the core problem.. it's icing without the cake. Well then. at least there's a new Elite out there to play.
That steaming pile of nonsense should've never left Chris Roberts' desk. All he did was embarrass himself.
I love that he literally demanded to know the names of the employees who were bagging on the company's HR practices. Edit: Holy holy holy shit. Edit 2: He literally brings up Derek Smart 20 times in that response.
Derek Smart is so unimportant and unaccomplished that Roberts needs to tell us 20 times just how unimportant and unaccomplished he is. Derek Smart is a tremendous asshole, no doubt, but methinks Roberts doth protest too much. Where there's smoke...
That interview managed to significantly lower my opinion of Chris Roberts, and I'm not talking about the accusations, I'm talking about reading his own words. I don't want the project to fail because I know there are people who have poured tons of money into it, and I don't want it to fail because I would love to have a game like this (functioning, of course). That said, something has to happen so people never put Chris Roberts in charge of anything ever again.
I think that what we're seeing right now is precisely why Electronic Arts wouldn't give Roberts the Wing Commander license.
While I'm not a fan of EA, I can't fault their reasoning here, if that was their reasoning. I wouldn't let Chris Roberts into the same building of any project I was working on.
Star Citizen began as an unlicensed Wing Commander reboot, and Roberts badly wanted to acquire the license. EA was open to the idea, except it wanted to assign one of its own producers to manage the project. Roberts' response was basically "fuck you, you're not my real dad," hence the crowdfunding and the clusterfuck we see now.
Well, shit. I'm starting to think Roberts could mismanage an Infocom game: "This is going to be the greatest game you ever played, it will show everything. We're adding Oculus Rift compatibility, as well as a social module, and that expansion will only cost us $15,000,000 to implement."
I believe it was mentioned earlier in this thread that Roberts is a fine idea guy, but a terrible manager. This is still true.
Yep. The first Wing Commander made it out the door because Warren Spector and Steve Beeman stepped up to make the engine work. Roberts had almost no involvement in Wing Commander II; it was essentially a Steve Beeman joint and Roberts consulted on the story. Roberts had literally no involvement in both Privateer games. He botched Strike Commander so badly that his brother Erin (now running Foundry 42, the only CIG studio to actually, you know, work) had to step in to help get it out the door. And with the third and fourth Wing Commanders, it was patently obvious that Roberts was more preoccupied with making movies. And Freelancer is a whole other story, considering he had to sell Digital Anvil to Microsoft and step away from the project in order for that to get made, since he ran out of money -- which it sounds like CIG may be in danger of doing, since the "only $8 million left in the bank" rumor seems to be gaining more and more traction.
It's funny how often Warren Spector's name comes up as a guy who reliably gets things out the door. Seems to be a rare quality among game designers.
Rumor is that CIG is heavily "encouraging" staff to respond to that Escapist article and go on Reddit to contradict statements.