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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

However, in the process they seem to have fully embraced the waterfall method which seems to me to be the root cause of the problem. They could have delivered the original concept as an MVP and continued to build towards their long-term vision through patches and incremental updates, much like rockstar did with GTA V online. Instead they're working slowly towards shipping a gigantic monolith where all that's playable in the meantime are very small vertical slices that don't really represent a game in their own right.

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Compare the process for "Star Citizen" to "Rimworld", another kickstarted project which is nearing a 1.0 release after years of development.

Rimworld had a public beta and has been iterating and incorporating feedback and while the end-result might not be as ambitious as someone with $200m might care to dream up (rimworld raised ~$250k) but it's a very fun game which most importantly actually exists.

In fact existing in some form allowed the community to write mods and extensions many of which have ended up patched into the game itself as it nears release.

I think a closer comparison is Elite Dangerous.

I regret backing Elite Dangerous, it's underwhelming.

The irony being that it's basically what SC promised in their KS.

If E:D is what SC has promised in their KS they are finished. Fly around for half an hour in the SC dogfighting mode, fly a bit more in the open world, maybe do a mission. Done. You have now fully experienced E:D. And that's with the current state of the Alpha.

And this is the unfortunate problem with the agile “release an MVP and iterate” approach when talking about a game. Unlike a SaaS product that might initially solve a problem, a game needs to be compelling, make a good first impression, and be fun, all out of the gate, to retain player interest. The Early Access model has continued to fail because people try the early version, dislike it (because it isn’t finished), then leave bad reviews and never return to see the game’s progress.

Elite continues to get better all the time and will likely eventually be a pretty good game, but it’ll never have the audience it would have if they had the budget to release a full and finished product on day 1.

I think that's because many early access developers don't put enough focus on the "Viable" aspect, and focus too hard on "Minimum". For a game to be viable it should express its core gameplay features in a compelling way. Iteration should just be building additional content on top of that, or building new modules that live on top of the core (like the FPS aspects of Star Citizen arguably should be).

True but I'd say it's that minimum and viable are much closer to the final product with games making the whole notion less useful.

that is very true, but with a huge game like Star Citizen you could likely strip out a huge share of the intended final-cut content and still have a quality and complete product.

Didn’t Minecraft release (obviously successfully) with this approach?

Minecraft released in alpha where you couldn't even mine or craft yet. In alpha it was basically a voxel terrain generator with a 1st person flying around view

No, in Alpha it was playable, with crafting and mining.

You're thinking of Classic or Pre-Classic. And IIRC, Survival Test (with mining and crafting) was the first thing you had to pay for to play. https://web.archive.org/web/20090904213840/http://www.minecr...

Me too, it just felt dull. I particularly regret it as they promised a single player version that would work without a network, and delivered a network-only game that requires a server to run. I much prefer the X3 games than E:D. They have an interesting mixture of dog fighting, empire building and missions, although the learning curve is steep.

Is GTA V Online a good example? Most of the delivered updates have just been additional vehicles and a few more game modes. I don't mean to sound like I'm shitting on the hard work they do, but GTA V Online wasn't really an "MVP".

I was thinking specifically of how they originally shipped when the game first came out. I don't really play it much but my understanding is that the initial version didn't contain heists, corporations, warehouses, half the mission types, half the vehicles, and so on. It may not have evolved much recently and the initial scope may have been over 50% of the current feature set, but they're the best example I can think of for an MMO MVP. For singleplayer games, minecraft would be an obvious choice but it was also the progenitor of early access so that's more of a hit-and-miss.

This changed starting at the end of last year. They are on a quarterly release cycle now, and they've hit the last 2 quarterly deadlines.

I'll preface with the fact I've not kept up with SC development at all. But haven't they released multiple "modules" as they've been going?

yes, but they're not building those atop a functioning game platform. They're completely separate, like individual prototypes. If they were integrated into a whole that'd be a totally different story.

They are though. You can go from flying a spaceship, land, get out, shoot some friends, get back in a spaceship and fly away. The module concept hasn't really been a thing for a while.

This is true, but I was under the impression that they were using separate mechanics for star Marine vs shooting in the persistent universe, which they're still in the process of merging together

no longer true

Part of the problem is that they're hacking MP into an engine that hasn't really been proven out for MP so until they get that sorted MP is gonna be rough.

Yeah but it seems like a huge problem that this issue hasn't been sorted out years into development. The whole premise of the game is based around playing in a shared persistent world: they should have gotten the multiplayer experience working perfectly in a proof-of-concept stage, with characters running around blank environments full of grey boxes before anything else.

At the moment it seems like they are a content production company for a game that doesn't exist.

That certainly would've been my first step.

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