Thread by @dsmart

Always amuses me that, almost 30 yrs since my first game, Battlecruiser 3000AD (aka BC3K), was released by Take Two, that it's still the go-to comparison for any team making an all-encompassing massive scope space game. Graphics aside, they ALL hit the same wall that I did.

When you build a massive space game, your #2 problem (with #1 being the tech to power it) is going to be how to populate it; and not just because you can, but because of what the game requires. And content repetition is the primary problem.

Every single massive scope space game that has attempted anything of the sort, has run into the same problem with content creation. No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, X series etc. all ran into the same thing because procgen can only go so far.

Imagine my surprise when someone on my Discord server alerted me to a recent YT stream about the upcoming Starfield game that was showcased last week during Microsoft's stream. FF to the 43:12 mark. Pretty sure those Germans are taking the piss as usual🤣

All kidding aside, IMO @StarfieldGame is absolutely, positively, not a space combat game; let alone a sim. It's a well-crafted RPG that just happens to have a Firefly type theme. That it has space combat and travel, is largely irrelevant, and not unlike having cars in your game.

For all intent & purposes, it could very well be Skyrim or Fallout - with a futuristic space theme as the backdrop. To that end, they don't need to create or populate a massive world like we did with BC3K, ED, X, NMS etc.

For a story based game like Starfield and which is the hallmark of Bethesda games, the world has to reflect the story and lore that they're trying to create. It doesn't need to be a massive, lifeless, world that's just there for bragging rights about its expanse.

Also, that it's single player should tell you all that you need to know about their goals as well as the fact that it's a complete nightmare to do multiplayer for a game like Starfield.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room:

As I wrote back in 2015, a game like Star Citizen could never - ever - be made. At the time, my thesis was based on the fact that the tech wasn't there, they didn't have the expertise to do it, and the funding they were asking for was never going to build it. Hence the scam.

I helped crowdfund Star Citizen in 2012 when it was within scope and coming in 2014. By 2015, after they jumped the shark and I took notice, I started to track it, writing the famous "July Blog" that got so much media attention that I was getting daily death & lawsuit threats.

Here's what I said in July 2015. I continued to track it all the way to 2019, and stopped writing once I determined that I had been right all along. It's 2023. 11 yrs and $600M+ later, they haven't even built a *single* starsystem for the game. It remains a ganky, buggy mess.

It's about setting realistic expectations and goals for the game you're building. If you're building a space combat sim that features a massive world for exploration, trading etc - do that. If you're building an RPG that focuses on story lines and a specific theme - do that.

By the same token, though I thus far haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that Starfield cost more than $175M to make, let alone the $600M that Star Citizen has burned on a PoC, they built a smaller scope space opera RPG because it's what they excel at building.

From what I've seen of Starfield, imagine for a minute what the Bethesda team could have built with a $600M+ budget, that talent and that tech. That's what I have been talking about since 2015. Here we are.

Speaking of which... via @PCGamesN

pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/c…

In closing, I still don't believe that any team would dare try to build a massive, all encompassing, space combat sim as I did with BC3K, but at the visual fidelity, RPG story scope, and tech that Bethesda has built for Starfield. It's an insurmountable task - for dreamers.

And that's specifically why I feel vindicated upon seeing this Starfield reveal a few days ago because I repeatedly wrote that they weren't stupid enough to try what Star Citizen claimed was possible. (Announcer: It's not)

The memory lane, memory hole.

dereksmart.com/2015/07/star-c…