Why is Star Citizen taking so long to make?

[TheMidnightNarwhal]

They have a really big budget and funds so why is everything always reported (like the FPS module) and takes so long?

[ANewFace]

Because they have a limited number of people, not the hundreds that big time developers have.

[Badger906]

they're probably trying to do it right! look what happens when they have a huge budget and rush a project.. it turns into batman gate!!

 

never knock a developer for taking their time! 

[Wauthar]

Because we, the audience, are involved from pretty much the start of the project. Have you ever seen this with other games? They take years to develop and you only hear from them months before the actual release.

That is the prime reason why 'it is taking so long'.

[TheMidnightNarwhal]

Because they have a limited number of people, not the hundreds that big time developers have.

 

Then why don't they hire more? They have the money for it.

[GarnetDevil]

Then why don't they hire more? They have the money for it.

 

Maybe the development fund restricts them from hiring more people?

 

Besides, not only SC takes so long to develop, look at Final Fantasy XV, it took 9 years for SE to announce that it will be available for PS4/XBone, LMAO

[ELSknutson]

I'm glad they are taking there time on it.

[Trik'Stari]

Probably because it's one of the most ambitious MMO's ever conceived.

[Bsmith]

Then why don't they hire more? They have the money for it.

more people=more costs=less budget for the game.

 

We should take quality over speed with games, we don't want unity and batman to become the standard after all.

[Napper198]

Then why don't they hire more? They have the money for it.

 

The thing is, 84 million $ is a good budget for one AAA title but Star Citizen is more like 3 AAA titles. There's the dogfighting module Arena Commander which based on the development effort could already count as one game, then the FPS module Star Marine which is also newly developed since there is no shooter that had physics based zero G combat; another game, tying both of these together for Squadron 42 (the rather longish singleplayer campaign) and then adding a crap ton of gameplay to make this a very ambitios MMO which will ultimately be Star Citizen takes enough coding and assets to count as a third game.

 

As @Wauthar already mentioned, one good AAA title takes years to develop (3 years seem to be a decent amount of time to make a decent, non-bugged one) and you only really hear about it until it's finished and in debugging phase. Star Citizen however is more comparable to Minecraft in it's development where parts of the game are already released to the public for hardcore players to enjoy and to grab some money but still calling it alpha or beta. This way they get fans excited and have a lot of crowd sourced QA and don't really need to care about a new feature being bugged right now.

 

But there is hope for you, since Star Citizen is going to make a lot of progress this year. Yes, the FPS is delayed as they're still messing with servers and animations, but from what I can tell the social module (first part of the PU) is almost ready and the Multi Crew (AC 2.0) also seems to come along well so it might be on time as well.

 

For me it's the same as most of the guys said in this thread and it is probably the answer you'll hear from 90% of the SC community. I'd rather wait for it to be released in 2019 than having a bugged, unfinished piece of crap that doesn't live up to it's hype.

[SynapseBreak]

It takes 9 months to birth a baby, but 9 mothers cannot birth a baby in 1 month. 
No matter the amount of funding, Star Citizen is working at the same pace it intended to from the start, only now with more money that CIG has raised they are able to add more onto the game in the same amount of time. 

[Agent181]

Cause star citizen will be a good game and made to be the best not like batman......

[rentaspoon]

It's worth pointing that they have changed the dogfighting module 3 times (the DF module was about 3 months late), the matchmaking has been changed twice and is being changed for a 3rd time, damage models are being redone, they are removing legacy network coding

After attempting to work with the legacy code, we decided that we needed to drop some of the legacy technology. "

Animations have been refined 2/3 times.

https://youtu.be/FSNjPXMMqCE?t=11m55s

 

If you read our last design post on the FPS, you will remember that one of the ways we want this experience to stand apart is that we aren’t ‘faking’ animations: anything your character does in the first person needs to look correct when viewed in the third person by another player without duplicate ‘fake’ animations that look different to each person.

 

so something AFAIK hasn't been done in another FPS game

 

They are doing things differently to industry standard and experimenting with new technics and tools.

 

And from Chris Roberts himself:

 

We ended the 2012 pledge campaign with ‘The Pledge,’ in which I outlined our new company’s goals to be open about our process. Today, I want to rededicate ourselves to this: I can’t promise you we’ll meet every internal deadline or that every decision we make is something you’ll agree with. There will be challenges that we struggle to overcome, and we will never be able to predict all of these with certainty…but I can promise you we will keep you informed and that we will not stop working until the game is done right. After all, that’s why we’re here in the first place. Your support is letting us create the game we want to make before anything else. Because of you, we have the freedom to make sure things work the way we want, even if it takes more time and more effort. We won’t let you down!

 

- Chris Roberts

 

[TheMidnightNarwhal]

more people=more costs=less budget for the game.

We should take quality over speed with games, we don't want unity and batman to become the standard after all.

Budget for the game is to hire people lol. They don't buy 3D models and etc they make them with people.

[rentaspoon]

Budget for the game is to hire people lol. They don't buy 3D models and etc they make them with people.

To many cooks spoil the broth.

Plus diminishing returns

[Wander Away]

Developing a game is not easy. Hiring more people helps up to a point, then the time it takes for them to communicate between one another becomes longer than they are actually working on anything. 

That's why there are dedicated groups of people working on different aspects of the game. 

 

AAA games like Call of Duty already have a fundamental layer of resources that the developers have from previous games in the series, thus saving lots of time on developing, and they still have two to three years of development, and have issues that needs to be patched after launch. 

 

SC is a different matter. They are customizing CryEngine, which in itself is a huge project. In addition, the many different aspects and mechanics of the game is equivalent to at least three AAA games in the traditional sense. I won't be surprised if SC take more than 5~6 years to make. 

[Adreyu]

Budget for the game is to hire people lol. They don't buy 3D models and etc they make them with people.

triple A games take at least this long to make anyway. grand theft auto 5 took 7 years and then even the pc version took 2 more and look how big that map was.

star citizen is much much bigger. and adding more people to already cramped offices doesnt necessarily work. too many cooks in the kitchen.

Just trust us, this isnt unusual. the only reason we notice is because we are privy to all aspects of development 

[LeightonPC]

If you really care about the game you would not want them to rush. Some of us are putting in a shit ton of money so we really want it to be done as well as possible. You could say that they have tons of money so they should just hire more developers but the more developers you have the more miscommunication that could happen.

[Grrizz]

Its been ~2.5 years so far + early concepting time, the first year the budget was set much lower too so the pace was much slower then and a lot of that work would have had to be redone to match the standards they have now set after getting a better idea of what their total budget will be, given games that have much, much smaller scopes take 3-10 years to develop I would say they are making amazing progress. On top of that they are setting up several game development studios as apposed to just building a game.

And as others have pointed out you cant just throw more people at a job to get it done quicker, the first few people you put to task will speed things up, each with diminishing returns but after a point things start to slow down again because of the coordination required.

If you are getting too anxious waiting I would suggest coming back in 1.5-2 years when its likely to release, those that are on board now should be well prepared for the fact we are in the alpha stages (a point people don't usually see in game development) and beta/full release is still a long way out.

[Ktwo]

It's not really a money problem. There comes a point where adding more people to something won't speed it up when it comes to software development. That coupled with the huge scale of this project results in long development time. It's pretty normal for games to take several years to develop. (especially for Blizzard, and alot of CIG's employees come from there haha)

[rentaspoon]

And they are literally working on it 24hrs, 5 days a week (not including staff overtime and unpaid hours that its worked on)

[drewjn]

@TheMidnightNarwhal

Considering true new ips, this game is not really that different in regards to time making it. Most AAA titles are practically rehashes of the same concept using already made mechanics and coding. All those require is texture updating and some small changes to do yearly releases.

 

Making games that are more open world usually take 2 or 3 years, if you go by bethesda, jrpg, ubisoft and other company standards. And most of those games have budgets near 200-400 million. So your sense of costs to results are already skewed. Not even counting that, most are buggy weeks after release.

 

Naughty dog and their games usually take around 4 years with non repeated ips. So you are bitching about star citizen taking more than 2 years? Try to keep things in better perspective.

 

 

They are building a game from the ground up using an engine that is not made for space and open world/universe aspects. That alone is daunting regardless of the sheer numbers they have. If you put too many people it becomes hectic and harder to control, and even money has its limit, especially since Squadron 42 took resources that equals a movie shoot, and not counting decent actors, still run about a decent 30+ million for a b-ranked screenplay. Since most goes to actors or outsourcing the graphics and sound teams; also the costs of creating the sets. Considering they did everything they could to decrease costs, even with the crowdfunding is quite respectful.

 

The fact that they are honest about what they do and show off the results often, even without the leaks that show even more, is a good sign of the direction of the game. This isn't No man's sky that only requires pre-built textures and a truly amazing algorithm (though that is an amazing feat in itself), this isn't Elite Dangerous which is entirely repetitious with no story or purpose to speak of (and graphically behind). Nor is this Skyrim, Witcher or other games. This is a game going in between. It will be expansive having hundreds or near thousands of worlds you can land on, hundreds of systems you can visit, or not even counting the distance of dead space in between them all. Even when going down to a scale of 1/4 the correct distance between stars, it is not only daunting in scope but nigh ridiculous for a company to make. Especially with limited procedural generation. Adding storylines to all of it too is confounding.

 

The mechanics they have been fleshing out, and that alone equals it to a AAA title game, adding everything else, like the PU is what is going to make it go for broke. And near 90million is quite limited considering all they have to do.

[Ginka]

fyi

 

[LeightonPC]

 

fyi

 

 

That is a very good way of showing people... They are making progress, it is slower than some people want, but the stuff they do is high quality. 

[rentaspoon]

fyi

As long as it beats elder scrolls I'm fine with it, it doesn't feel mmo tho