Yeah, the narrower scope should have been what was on the Kickstarter. I backed a space combat game - adding racing etc was a total "WTF are you doing?" moment for me, and it's just got worse. all that ***** could have been added after the game was live. sandworms, FFS. really.
I doubt there'll be a dozen systems, if so far they've barely got two planets or whatever it is. IMO, there should have just been spacestations ~ modular perhaps, so they could have they assembled different ways enough to make each a little bit different ~ and had them above planets you couldn't get to; adding the planetary landings/access, or just atmospheric combat above cities even if you couldn't land there, would have been a huge addition that would bring in fresh media attention, fresh hype and new players. now, it seems they want to have everything and dump it all at once, and they're failing on multiple levels. even if it comes out great, what will they have to add fresh life to the game? a new ship or two? that's sort of "meh" for everyone but the ones who want that ship.
the large ships are fantastic, and had massive potential for game fun; going from space combat to boarding a ship and doing FPS action would have been stunning. controlling a ship like that would have been interesting too for those who are into that sort of thing - taking a massive tanker/freighter around systems could have been interesting, and controlling a battleship or something could have been stunning too, if they'd been able to get some wargaming type mechanics working so you could control fighter launches, defence battery firing and the like.
"Do you belive this game is going to die and fail?" sadly, yeah, I think so. there are several problems I can foresee;
- S42 is still only Beta next year, so when the main game will be ready, who knows. and if S42 is cac, it will colour perceptions of what the main game will finally end up like.
- if the game launches and you can't use that $1600 ship you paid for and have been waiting to use for 2 years, you're gonna be ****ed off, and that will cause bad blood at best, legal issues at worst.
- The stuff we're seeing/have seen, is arguably years old tech (some, anyways), so the end result could look very dated against other newer games, and that could affect reviews/word of mouth, and that could affect people wanting to buy in
- If the game is not stellar, if it end up only getting 60, 70% in reviews or whatever, it'll probably be a death knell. it
needs to be high 90s to live up to the hype.
- they've already been gazumped by Elite: Dangerous, there could be any number of other games quietly under development that could steal SC's thunder. In my opinion, it's a massive blessing that E
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is what it is ~ people still tied to the cockpit, a lot of nothing going on in 99.99% of the universe; because if it did a lot of what SC's touting, ie let you get out, FPS in stations and planets etc etc, I think a huge amount of people would have given up and jumped ship already.
@bigmike20vt ~ don't think that's an issue so far, at least as far as I saw when I last played a couple years back, in that the environment was there but other aspects weren't - no interacting NPCs etc - so i'd think (hope) that on release you could go to the same place, but now there'd be a lot of characters to talk to, shops to buy stuff in, etc etc. I might be way out of date on that though.