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How reasonable is expecting 2016 Launch ?
Shadanwolf
Member UncommonPosts: 2,392
Anyone have any thoughts on the game getting out this year .....or is 2017 more reasonable ?
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PS Of course, neither CF nor CU will launch in 2016, with even 2018 being a possibility.
If you assume it is coming out in 2016 and they haven't said it is coming out in 2016, then I would say that is generally unreasonable.
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Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
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If they are building a 'sand box' game how hard is taht? Guy put out foundation stuff in months. As in a world game mechanics, character creation models. If they are going to have 'classes' then it really isnt a sand box. So make a skill set and advancement system and you have soemthing ready for release.
If they add NPCs or quests or whatever later on what does that matter? If its non linear they can add that stuff whenever and where ever they want to going forward.
Take a game like ARK or Life is Feudal what if they suddenly said...lets have quests and NPCs and dungeons (ARK is already adding some things) does that make the game better or worse and why would it have to stop them from releasing what tthey have had for months?
Most game at release are garbage anyway especially int he content department do holding them back to basically add more 'content' doesnt make sense.
If a developer cant get a base game made and working in a year and a half then they shouldnt be releasing one anyway.
The arguments were always size and scope as the reasons why games took so long to develop. When what people should have focused on is world building and generic development is the easiest thing to do and thats why these pocket games with small maps and limited server sizes can be pushed out so fast. Link a few of those together every few months and it wouldnt take long to have a fairly large game going. If ARK or LiF or any other one of these games added what they launched with every 6 months after 5 years (the time most people think it would take to develop a game) they would have something making money and expanding for those 5 years. But they also know hype is much better than reality. So whats better a game that could have grown 8 or 10 times and playable or the hype train?
This is a very small team both this and Pantheon have budgets that are simply too small to expect anything hyping as a Triple A game.
I will however be interested to see just what both games can do with a short budget and small team,i am not expecting too much so perhaps they can both surprise me.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Speaking of budgets (currently CF - $6.5M, CU - $7M) AFAIK they should suffice roughly till mid-2017 at least, that is - if pledgemeters keep on ticking in their current, rather slow tempos.
Of course, alphas/betas and especially pre-launch should accelerate that a bit.
However in practice, not all the money goes toward development. ACE is publishing tons of eye candy art and that costs a lot in salaries (at least 4 people were creating art concepts, posters and banners for a long time), they've many community staff, translators, web design and admins, VP of production, advisors, video producer, etc. to pay salaries for and as far as I know most of their work do not contribute to game development directly.
Another important expense is creating polished environments (maps) that are only used temporarily and then deleted. The KS demo and the Hunger Dome are examples: it must have taken so much time polishing those maps with all the trees, hills, structures, objects, grass, etc. just to see them scrapped later. Of course they plan to reuse some of the things, but it's still extremely time consuming to make an environment look "awesome" and only parts of it will be used in the real game.
As for CSE, I guess that most of the backers' money goes into game development, but they probably also spend some money on things like forum staff, live streams, communication on social medias, etc. Not really a problem imo since it's information given to the backers about the game development and CSE most likely keep their expenditures to the minimum.
Say, teams tend to grow before launch but OTOH pledgemeters will also accelerate significantly. Crowfall spent a million before KS - I wonder whether Gordon counted that in his "$6M for core game" from last April....And so on (I must stop typing before I write series of textwalls).
It's quite possible that CF underestimated (to put it mildly) time/money needed to optimize good old Unity for large scale, and it seems to me that CU is doing something similar with, say, The Depths - the most substantial answer I managed to get (Ben, twitch stream chat) was roughly "We have procedural terrain generation" (!) while others were standard "Don't worry"s
As for Unity, there's no evidence that it can support even medium size battles (50v50) with acceptable performances. Optimization can help getting better frame rate, but engines have intrinsic limits and judging from Hunger Dome, a very small map (arena type) with trees, 2 types of monsters, ~25 players, houses, a big stronghold... and it's already hard to get decent frame rate.
The Depths would be really cool, like double icing on the cake. They got some great ideas for it... I agree that it was maybe too ambitious for the scale of the project. I'm confident that CSE will do their best to deliver what was announced though!
- Howard Smith, ex-Lead Client Programmer who announced and "officially defended" Unity choice, left the team meantime!? Sky is not falling OFC, I just see it as a fun fact
- The most Unity-optimistic "independent" source (since CF programmers are kinda bound to filter info and be U-optimists) I talked to is Senior Programmer Marc Hernandez of...Camelot Unchained!
He is CF pledge owner BTW (ssshhh! I didn't say this!) and considers MMO optimization possible, but it might require insane (my reading of his words) amount of man-hours i.e. money - relative to what CF can afford if nothing significant happens to the pledgemeter.
Now, I believe that ACE will have enough time (a year and a half or more IMO) to deliver decent framerate in 50 vs 50 or even higher, but the game won't be able to operate on MMO scale without at least 300-500 players supported in small area.
Otherwise - with lower numbers - they'd have to put concurrent server players cap at, say, 800 or 500 or even lower, in order to avoid constant server crashes in "highly orchestrated" Campaigns (think: Eve). "Continent" sizes would take huge hit and Campaigns would - at best - last a week or two.
At least that's my noob opinion on Unity, server caps and MMO vs MMOBA. Of course - I'd love to hear something more than another "Don't worry" from devs.
Oh wait. There aren't any.