Star Citizen

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Started by Raven, Jan 23, 2017, 05:40 AM

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Raven

So they've been working on the game for 6 years and it will likely take another 3 at least.  You're looking at a 10 year dev cycle.  Crazy long time.  Could even be next gen before it releases.  
No. Like I said, they've only been working on it for 4 years and almost half of that time was spent actually building the company so they could make the game. It's also a huge MMO AND a separate single player game they're making. It took Bioware over 6 years to make The Old Republic, and that was an established developer with the financial backing of EA right from the start, creating what largely amounted to a WoW / EQ-clone with cinematic dialogue. It bombed and went free-to-play in less than a year.

The single player game, Squadron 42, will probably release late this year, which they didn't even start really working on until January 2014, a year after they began work on Star Citizen. This also puts the beginning of its development right in the middle of them building up the company. Performance capture for the game didn't even start until April 2015. At most, the single player game has been in development for 3 years now. The same amount of time it takes one of Activision's established studios to crank out yet another Call of Duty.

The MMO, Star Citizen, will probably hit retail release in 2019 or 2020 at the latest. That would put its development timeline around 7 or 8 years. That's not too terribly far outside the norm for a new, big MMO and to be expected considering it's not hyperbole to say that this game may very well be the most ambitious of all time. It's being created by a developer that didn't even have all the studios it needed until 2.5 years after it began and didn't even have roughly the same number of people as Naughty Dog until close to 3 years after. Plus, it's not even the only project they have, though the two do tie into one another.

These guys are building what is either going to be the greatest disappointment in gaming of all time or the most impressive game ever and the best ever made in its genre, which may very well determine the near future fate of the MMO and space-sim genre. With that kind of pressure, all eyes being on you after raking in what is now over 142 million dollars and approaching 2 million backers, you kinda wanna do it right and make sure it's as awesome as you could have made it. That takes time.