Do you have any source for that claim regarding MOP and The Escapist? Just bringing up that quote isn’t a magical “I am right” button.
I tried their free trials 4 times. Twice I encountered game breaking bugs (required a restart and switching servers respectively).
Let’s ignore that for now. I will start with the good things. The planet to space transition was pretty cool, not going to lie. The cities were also detailed and looked nice (the first time you take the train in one of the cities, it does contribute to the world building). That being said, both the planets and the POI have nothing to offer in terms of actual gameplay structure. The cities might as well be a menu based system for purchases/interactions. The planets just have some random uninspired mission locations that all feel the same. You might as well have a separate map that you enter via cutscene.
But the biggest issue was the horrible gameplay. It’s one of the reasons I believe star citizen is a scam.
I will use a small trading indie game called Merchant of the Skies as a comparison point. It was developed by a husband and wife duo in less than 12 months. The game has:
- Dynamic world impacted by trading activities. City taxation/reputation, new resources, new locations, new ships and upgrades all open up as you complete various trading missions.
- Bazaar system. There are several location on a map that have weekly bazaars. Certain days have peak visitors while others are off days. You have to time your arrivals/trading.
- Supply and demand system in bazaar sales. You over/under price your goods depending on how much of your ship’s inventory you want to sell. This is also tied to the weekly visitors intensity system.
- Refueling system. Locations on the edge of the map have refuelling station that are few and far between. There is a simple RNG system for bonus fuel during travels.
- Mail/passenger travel side missions. You can occasionally help travellers and deliver mail. It’s fun to align this with your trading activities.
- Different late-game ships that you can pick depending on your play-style (it’s not only about cargo capacity, it does actually have a relatively big impact on how you go about the game).
This is just the gameplay that is relevant for comparison. There is also in-depth base-building, complex trade fleets and delivery scheduling, a simple RPG system, a simple ship employee system, a simple bank system, a resource gathering system, rudimentary exploration (map is randomized on each run), a mainline story and a bunch of different side missions.
Now compare that to star citizen. No supply/demand. No world impact. No economy. There is nothing to do except get more money to get ships. Sure you play with other players, but is there any kind of competition in terms of trading? They don’t even have a functional escort system where you can hire NPC ships for defence against griefers.
And crude gameplay is not limited to trade. FPS combat with single digit ticks? Exploration with one fully explored system? I will add that they sell non-functional “exploration ships” for hundreds of dollars; some of them are literal JPEGs. There is a bunch of other stuff that they’ve marketed but have simply not implemented or completely abandoned after the initial cash shop sales campaign (data running, journalism spaceships, refuelling spaceships, passenger transport spaceships, medical spaceships, farming spaceships, flying bazaar spaceship, mine laying spaceship, the list just goes on and on).
And this is after ~12 years and allegedly ~$750 million spent on development.
I will speculate a lot of that money goes to the founder’s family, key insiders and friends and they knowingly lie about their capabilities, intentions and just make shit up to sell JPEGs.
You don’t have to agree with the last point, but am I wrong with respect to trading/hauling in SC?
“People give them money for a game” as a business model seems to be applied evenly for everyone else except CIG and Star Citizen. They were given money by fans to make a game. It currently is playable and is in active development. You put up an example where the game has similar systems but radically different gameplay. Star Citizen has gameplay, it is a fun activity to play with friends and it has a thriving ecosystem (despite your clearly untrue claim otherwise). You don’t play it, only know about it in the abstract, and don’t seem to understand game development.
Hating Star Citizen feels less like genuine criticism and more like angry people grasping at a meme.
Two months ago they released it: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1eo7m5w/the_new_hauling_missions_are_a_ton_of_fun_but/
Why you hate this game is a mystery. It hasn’t done anything to you and is working to fulfill the promises it made. But you are acting like a 3 year old child who wants it immediately and fuck the waiting.
No, just no. You compared it to a very simple game that can run all of that from a single back end. I created a similarly simple economic simulation in an Excel sheet from a single supply/demand curve in college, in a weekend.
And then you go on to knock them for not being feature complete when they tell you that themselves. They absolutely are still developing, they’re releasing the second system in the next big patch.
Nobody is going to argue with you that it’s had issues. But at least give it a fair comparison. That’s what’s got people upset.
I left out features of Merchant of the Skies that are not relevant for a comparison.
The fact is that after 12 years and ~$750M allegedly spent on development, the trading/hauling gameplay is more crude than a indie game developed by two people.
That they are “still developing” is irrelevant. It is not unreasonable to question where the money is going considering how crude the gameplay is (if it even exists as we can see from the journalism spaceship JPEG).
Because they’ve got about a million things to do. So yeah, it’s pretty basic gameplay right now. Nobody is denying that. But to reduce multiple engine switches, court enforced stop work orders, and assets in production to “they spent everything over a decade and all they have is a jpeg”, is just ridiculous.
