I don’t actually think you can call it that.
I’m pretty sure they’ve spent every cent, considering how much they have in fact produced.
The part that boggles me to this day, is that they spend the money on making a litany of insanely high quality assets and features, with seemingly no plan for how they’ll fit together.
And then they proceed to spend even more money, and time, on trying to fit it all together into something that functions like a complete system.
And that’s before you discuss their obsession with “realism”. What there is to play, is marred with balancing issues. Better ships are just… Better. Because they insist on weapons and ships functioning “logically” within the game universe, rather than in whatever way is the most fun.
Fighters beat bigger ships because equipping the same weapons, a fighter can hit every shot it takes at a slow moving giant. Meanwhile the travel-time of weapons makes the fighter completely unkillable for the big ship, becayse the fighter can land shots from a range where its own speed allows it to dodge literally everything the big ship might send its way.
The project is real, but it’s a mismanaged catastrophe.
It’s basically what happens when you have a project with overly understanding financiers, an overly ambitious creative head, and absolutely no concern whatsoever for avoiding scope creep.
Kind of amazing really. I can imagine in centuries past an architect becoming the personal favourite of a king so he just keeps making the palace he’s tasked to build more and more extravagant since the king keeps giving him more money endlessly.
The money is going to salaries, so it’s basically just extended development. They’re all working and doing something. It’s basically just instead of releasing a game 6 years ago that was barebones and okay they’re making the sequel and won’t release the final game until they’re well done.
I’m confident it will release eventually, maybe another 5-8 years. As long as the devs don’t die of old age.
Asafum@feddit.nl 4 days ago
Two of their biggest mistakes were: one, essentially hiding the fact that the single player game Squadron 42 has taken the lions share of the development focus for the last 6+ years. This makes it appear like they just don’t know what they’re doing at all with star citizen and that’s why they’re slow (they still don’t 100% know what they’re doing).
Second, they made their sound design guy who was just interested in being a pilot and eventually learned how, to be their lead ship performance/gameplay director/developer (not sure exactly on the title name.) that has lead to the ships just not flying how people want or expect them to. That and Chris Roberts wants “WWII, star wars, type dogfights” when people want Newtonian physics, excess speed, fighting.