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Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous?
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I agree with you 100%.
For example, Eve Online's development was excellent from 2003 to 2008, but then money and effort was siphoned off for other ventures (DUST, WoD, and Valkyrie). Many players still think that Eve Online's development is OK despite the high subscription fee ($100 per year), but I think this is mostly a triumph of PR over substance.
The increased competition is most definitely a good thing.
Simple answer : Both.
Star Citizen has a wealth of features and masses of funding to back them up. It looks superb (even the hangar module). I feel it will be extraordinary in combat, but will lack some of Elite's charm/peaceful elements.
As for Elite... well David Braben is a genius. I was brought up playing Frontier Elite II on the Commodore Amiga, and it remains my favourite game of all time. I have still, to this day, never put as many hours into a game as I did Elite II.
I'm a supporter of both games, and I look forward to them both equally.
Once both games make it out of beta, and I actually get to play them, then i'll give you an informed answer. Everything else is just dreams and guesswork.
Anyone in the games industry will tell you that everyone can have great ideas. Making those ideas into great gameplay is the trick.
This. I can't wait until Elite comes out in march. If these games both succeed, we might se a plethora of new space sims following in their wake, too.
Here's a totally wild concept for you from the fringes of sanity... You can play and enjoy both games! Yes I know, I know it goes against all the holy fanboy concepts of, "My game is better than your game!" and, "There can be only ONE!" but it is possible if you drop your fanboyism and just look at both games from a gamers perspective. These 2 games will provide different play experiences but along the same concepts of space exploration and commerce. Both games can be enjoyed and the may even compliment each other... I know another totally crazy concept but it is possible. You only have to open your mind for it to become a reality for you.
Bren
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I fondly remember both Frontier and Wing Commander.
I remember playing both of them for quite different reasons, WC for the cinematic feel and the high octane space combat with great graphics, sound and immersion factor, while Frontier was much more freeform and sandboxy.
Even if Star Citizen has a lot of sandbox elements, I expect the difference to remain, with SC being a more cinematic, structured and story-driven feel. I'm commited to Star Citizen, but am also following ED with interest.
A few points on both sides:
1) Atmospheric flight in SC. Technically, this is possible, but it is to be seen if it will be EVER implemented. Going with the crafted approach, I cannot really see the SC crew being able to recreate the hundreds of planets they will have in the game, so I am not sure how they can pull that off. It does not bother me that much.
2) Star Citizen also uses procedural generated content for things like exploration, salvage etc. Not EVERYTHING is hand crafted, but most of it is.
3) What is the point of having a 400 billion stars galaxy anyway? No one will ever visit even a 1% of all those stars and it will spread the player population immensely. Imagine if all humans on Earth would play that game, there would still be one for every 100 billion stars. Finding another player would be incredibly rare changing it in a single player game, basically.
Now, I know that there will be a slice of "known space" where the 3 factions and most of the NPCs will be and that is fine, but so what is the use of the rest of the billions of stars? Can you even have enough fuel to reach them, considering there is prolly nothing there but lifeless planets? I remember Frontier had them too, but most of the game content was in the known space anyway.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
The point is that 400 billion stars and total freedom is a great combination. I remember playing outer-empires wih it's 20k star systems when all factions were fighting for the lucrative space near the starter areas, my alliance flew a space station flatpack to the furthest point away in the galaxy and set up shop just because we could.
If you played Frontier or Elite you will remember that a fuel scoop and the corona of a sun allowed you to refuel so nowhere is unreachable.
the point of a sandbox game is to provide the Universe and let the players work out what they want their game to be. To some it will be bounty hunting or piracy and constant dogfights. To others it will be finding the edge of the universe. To others it will be setting up shop somewhere remote and building a community there.
100cr and a sidewinder. The rest is up to you.
elite dangerous have a game so far
star citizen have a cash-shop
make your decision
Okay, decision: both.
As a fan of space sims I am looking forward to both ,SC with it's more cinematic feel and set pieces and Elite with it's massive sandbox universe, both would seem to be using multi instancing (32 ships for Elite per) so I doubt their will be much real difference on that side .
Elite has gone to great lengths to keep the style of it's original (anyone who played computers in the 1980's should know what I mean) with it's ship's etc ,and preserve the feeling of a large ship in space whereas SC has the look of fighter planes in space ,neither is better only different. And while SC will have eva and FP from word go Elite players will have to await the promised expansion but given that Elite is about a year ahead of SC in production terms Elite players may well have all this before SC finally goes live.
So far Frontier have been very open about their plans and their entire DDF (design discussion) is available online ,that coupled with the fact that Frontier have met their promised deadlines so far (and with a superb Alpha) and all SC have produced are some ship models and a very buggy Hangar module (cash generator) I have more confidence in Frontier at this time ,the much promised DFM was pulled at the last minute and after seeing their vid you can see why (was this because the Elite Alpha was so much better?)
Another large part of any MMO is the community, anyone who visits the SC or Elite forum cannot help but notice the different tone of these respective forums and as such I would rather spend my time in the Elite Universe (the different attitude is even very clear on this thread),but as I said at the start I intend to play both
This last comment is by way of warning ,many of us older gamers remember very well the massive pre production hype of John Remaros "daikatana" a game which at the time had unpreccidented funding and made huge promises and which even after years of delay failed to meet those promises (anyone see any comparison their?), I really hope this isnt the case of SC but the feature creep they seem fixated by makes matching peoples expectations almost impossible.
Anyway good luck to both
The choice is
they were going to release some buggy crap then saw the Elite Alpha and thought better of it
Or
they knew months in advance that it wouldn't be ready for release and continued to tell people they were fundraising from that it would.
neither option gives me huge confidence. Let's hope they start concentrating on production and not marketing over the next year or so and turn the ship around.
As much as no one, including myself, likes to think of things in this way... Elite: Dangerous has and always will have a fraction of the budget of Star Citizen, at this point Star Citizen is literally making up things to justify their crowdsourcing funds while Elite: Dangerous is likely to struggle.
Active: WoW
Semi-retired: STO
Fully retired: UO, EQ, AC, SWG, FFXI, DDO:EU, PoTBS, AoC, EvE
Tried: EQ2, Tabula Rasa, Auto-Assault, Isteria, LotRO, Wizard 101
Looking forward to: Star Citizen
Star citizen is not wasting it's money. It's the 1st game from a brand new company. They've hired top talent, and the best equipment/software. There is game updates all the time. It is a pretty transparent company.
It is ignorance to criticize such an ambitious and so far level headed project.
You misunderstood me. My point was that when discussing ED vs. SC, it's unfortunately going to end up coming down to the fact that SC is going to spend ED into the ground and that really isn't something that be overcome.
I agree with all of your points. In fact if anything what I'm saying is that Star Citizen is one of those rare games that actually has the budget to do what they say they're going to do. What I meant by "making stuff up" to justify their crowdsourcing, is that at this point the "stretch" goal are basically them saying, "Well if we get another million... we'll uh... make a black hole? WITH ZOMBIES! Because we have so much money we can afford to make up bullshit to add to the game." Which I think is awesome actually.
Active: WoW
Semi-retired: STO
Fully retired: UO, EQ, AC, SWG, FFXI, DDO:EU, PoTBS, AoC, EvE
Tried: EQ2, Tabula Rasa, Auto-Assault, Isteria, LotRO, Wizard 101
Looking forward to: Star Citizen
Depends on point of view.
Neither are MMORPGs. That is certain.
Both are games from different genres with some MMO elements. And some people throw the term MMO around for any game where people can play online together like LoL or lobby games like GW1.
Actually, the budgets are quite similar, the Elite Kickstarter was more to gauge the level of interest, Frontier Developments had their own cash reserves to invest and also sold a minority stake in the company on the stock market to raise more.
If you factor in the fact that Frontier have a fully tooled team already up and running at an established location and have spent years building their in house engine to run both the space and planetary landing aspects of their game you could argue their budget for creating the game is actually larger than SC.
You really should take a look at their game list. Nothing in there screams money to me. Nor an incredible amount of talent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Developments
Most of their games are made for a publisher for example Microsoft, they get a fee and make the requested game for less, The publisher then sells it. This has grown a company valued at £38m by the stock valuation. I believe they invested £7m of their own cash, raised a similar amount from selling a minority stake on the stock market and £2.2m crowdsourced. That's a budget of £17-18m or about $27m, that's a fraction of about 8/10 of SCs budget.
As for talent, firstly I am guessing you never heard of the original Elite and Frontier games, and secondly there is enough there that companies such as Nintendo and Microsoft choose to employ them to develop their launch titles. This has allowed them to get paid money to develop their own in house Cobra engine custom designed around a future Elite release.
Time will tell which of E:D or SC is the better game, either way I am happy we are getting 2 space sims with large budgets.
Not to mention that when SC wanted to launch alpha (DF module) they realized "oh sh1t, even if we use cry engine we still need to write some code (networing) not only design ship and do PR"
-EDIT- accidentally went on a rant about what a crap community star citizen has, which was off topic.
-OP-
Elite seems like it has more hope as far as economic influence, and empire building, though the solo player mode does seem to contradict that in a sense(not sure how that will pan out)
However Star Citizen, the economy sounds pretty untouchable, and empire building sounds like it's impossible.
The main difference is that ED has a publisher and Star Citizen does not. For publisher titles, most of the money does not go to developing the game. CR said himself the same thing. However, for a game like Star Citizen, about 5/6 of money goes directly to development. So $40 million for SC is like $150 million for game like GTA5 in terms of money spent on developing the game.
You are wrong, Elite: Dangerous is self-published by Frontier Developments themselves.